Datalogic has received a contribution of 846,000 Euros for Research & Development activities from a project financed by the Emilia Romagna Region (POR FESR 2014-2020). The project presented by Datalogic, called AIDA (Adaptive Industrial Automation through cyber-physical vision systems), was top position of the "type B" ranking which includes research and development activities aimed at introducing new products or services in the market, or adoption of new production technologies that foresee new investments and production expansions in the regional territory and can have an impact on new employment in the reference sector.
The strong diffusion of digital technologies in factories is now a fact, but recent initiatives for Industry 4.0, have introduced a new element: the Cyber-Physical System (CPS), the integration of physical and IT devices not only at machine level but also at factory or even supply chain level.
The transition requires a real change of mentality. Products intended for industrial automation must "work in a group". They must perform and be flexible to adapt to different working conditions, to communicate with standard protocols of products from other vendors and to provide all the additional information needed to optimize the system and make it robust.
The goal of the AIDA project was to rethink many of our products in terms of CPS and to develop the technologies necessary for this purpose.
Among Datalogic's many products in the field of industrial automation, we have focused on some to make them increasingly adherent to the new paradigms, in particular: smart readers, vision sensors, vision systems and photocells and safety barriers.
The various prototypes developed within AIDA were used to build a CPS demonstrator. In the demonstrator all devices form a network and communicate with each other using the standard OPC-UA protocol.
The AIDA project is fully part of the “Industry 4.0” model, as it will allow Datalogic and manufacturers of automation solutions to equip themselves to meet the challenges of advanced manufacturing in terms of interconnection and exploitation of the potential of embedded systems.
