A visit to Smart Factory Expo

This past Wednesday, I got a chance to visit Smart Factory Expo in Liverpool. Just a short train ride away, it was easy enough to get to. Anyone who knows Liverpool, knows that, despite appearing to be a large city, it's actually quite small and you can walk almost anywhere in the city centre. Thankfully it was a bright day, albeit a little cold. 

The Liverpool Exhibition Centre is a pleasant, modern riverside venue and I was happy to get into the warmth of the show. Going in, it immediately struck me as a very well-designed show. The majority of the stands seemed to be custom built, with a large pavilion spanning the centre of the hall, with a large number of businesses occupying the individual desks. The first thing I do when I arrive at a show is always to just have a walk around in order to get my bearings and have a first impression of anything that stands out. 

There really was a lot to see, even if the show was significantly smaller than Advanced Engineering (which I visited recently). There was a large number of different robots performing an assortment of different demonstrations and tasks, but the first stand that made me stop and have a look was the Microsoft stand. Having grown up with video games, I've always had an interest in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), though I never really knew the practical applications of it outside of entertainment. I was offered a chance to try the Microsoft Hololens, which I was eager to try, as I had known about the project for years but never seen one in person. Honestly, I was a little blown away by this. The demonstration is meant to show how complex tasks can be taught to people with no prior experience. It involved changing brake pads of a car (which I had never done before), and the AR guidance was not only clear and easy to follow, it was also quite beautiful in a way. Seeing what feels like a hologram from science-fiction direct you to pick up a certain tool or showing you how to move a component was a very enjoyable experience. It leaves me to wonder how soon AR will become a common training tool, or when it will start to become a common thing in remote supervision, demonstrations or tours of factory floors. 

The next big highlight for me was that I got to see Spot, Boston Dynamics' robot dog, in person for the first time. It's a fair bit larger than I expected from videos, but mainly I was surprised by how quiet it was. Even when it was moving around, I could not hear the actuators or any of its movements over the background noise of the show. This particular Spot came from the Manufacturing Technology Centre, and was equipped with a module meant for analysing apple orchards. It was aptly named Robo Crop. Essentially, it's meant to be an autonomous quality control operator for the agricultural sector. Having a highly mobile, small and all-terrain robot that can independently inspect a range of trees and then flag up which trees are infected or not well seems like a hugely promising innovation that has many positive implications: reduced labour costs, an non-intrusive inspection method, and a highly efficient way of inspecting everything accurately. Because I've written about Spot before, specifically with a laser scanning attachment, and because I've followed Boston Dynamics for a while, this was terribly exciting for me to see in person. On the professional side, it also makes me excited to see how this sort of technology might be implemented on factory floors. Of course automatic inspection is not a new thing, though in most cases it's a sensor mounted along a conveyor belt, or maybe a robot arm with sensors in a scanning box. Is there any application for robots physically walking around factory floors to inspect things? Or is it the limit of the human perception that makes us think a physical being walking around is an efficient solution? 

One of the main exhibitors for the inspection side of things who I spoke to was Zebra Technologies. Exactly as I mentioned above, they demonstrated their automatic inspection sensors, which take high-speed photographs of products moving along a belt. It's a practical solution that works well within a factory setting. At the same time, they also had a warehouse-type robot, which looked a bit like an automatic filing cabinet. Capable of carrying over 70kg, it could sort items on shelves and move them around. Maybe this kind of robot is what we can expect more of in factories and warehouses, rather than a walking kind. 

Between the sports cars, thermal imaging, VR headsets, software companies and countless robot arms, there was so much to see it would be difficult to summarise it all. Of course, going into the show I knew that there would not be an abundance of metrology companies, or quality assurance/control or inspection specialists, but it was still good to find a few. Hexagon was there, of course, as well as Keyence. Software Imaging showed me an impressively simple system for implementing full traceability on factory floors. Vinci Construction let me view a construction site time lapse on a VR set, ACMI4.0 shared some interesting insights of their view on inspection and production optimisation, and Brainboxes impressed me with their simple, effective solution that's produced entirely in the UK.  

Overall, it may not have been directly aimed at our demographic, but everything that is made has to be measured, and you can only make as good as you can measure. It was certainly an interesting day out, and I hope to return to the next iteration of the event and see what new technologies will steal the show.