In the past, there was little recognizable exchange between consumer and industrial technology. Why has this changed in the wake of Industry 4.0?

The term Industry 4.0 describes the project of extensive digitalization of industrial production; conventional production structures are increasingly being replaced by intelligent, self-controlling, sensor-supported and interconnected production systems. In the industrial environment, this is referred to as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and includes terms such as smart factories, extreme automation and industrial robotics. Of course, this is a clear distinction from the IoT world of end consumers. The aim of making processes smarter and therefore easier for the user is of course identical - regardless of whether we are talking about smart factories or smart homes.

Another way to put it is that the IIoT represents the concrete use of IoT technologies across industrial boundaries, meaning that the separation between consumer and industrial technology is becoming increasingly blurred. This is also underlined by new terms such as smart city: the term encompasses the digitalization of areas as diverse as industry, energy, security systems, mobility, healthcare, retail and housing, and brings them together.

What can the industry learn from consumer applications?

"It is important to personalize the human environment to make life more comfortable and enjoyable and to relieve people of tedious routine tasks," said H. S. Kim, President and CEO of Samsung Consumer Electronics, at the opening of the Consumer Electronic Show in January this year. This objective in the development of new consumer products and solutions is also, in a slightly different form, identical to the demands placed on modern production lines. Just as modern smart home systems allow end customers to view and control everything about their living space from anywhere in the world at any time, including, for example, receiving maintenance notifications for the heating system as a calendar entry, this should also apply to today's production lines. The look and feel of the machine, line control, maintenance and diagnostics app, the connection to the selected e-mail program and calendar, access to special cloud data and applications will be identical to an app for online banking, city parking or music streaming.

Due to the increasing mobility of employees, combined with some working from home or from globally distributed partners, professional or private data is very often accessed from the same end device as a smartphone or tablet. The smart factory is still learning from smart consumer products, but the fusion is already in full swing.

How does the consumer market in the field of vision technologies influence developments in the industry?

Developments in the consumer market in recent years have made the current trend towards IoT possible in the first place and have now triggered it in the long term. With more and more connected devices and therefore a multitude of data options, AI applications are also finding new areas of use and are constantly being developed further. From "neural networks" to "deep learning" to today's AI boom, the classic machine vision sector is currently being strongly influenced, especially as these developments in AI are also further fueled by dedicated hardware in embedded systems - hardware that we no longer only find in smartphones from Huawei, Google or Apple.

When products from consumer development manifest themselves in the industry, is sufficient long-term availability still guaranteed?

IoT dissolves the old separation of these areas. The requirements for (I)IoT products in terms of robustness and long-term availability vary greatly, from smart phones to smart homes and smart factories. The market for IoT solutions is many times larger than the traditional consumer market. This offers new growth potential for its players. Sony is developing new sensor technologies for autonomous vehicles together with Bosch, among others. Qualcomm offers the latest processor platforms that combine an embedded camera interface, AI technologies and wireless communication interfaces directly in one chip and - as mentioned above - are available for the long term. The merging of the markets via IoT and the associated multitude of new camera-based applications is pushing the embedded vision sector.

How does this development change Vision Components' approach?

VC has been developing smart cameras and embedded vision systems, which now form the basis for the IoT, for almost 25 years. In the course of the IoT, the embedded market is increasingly changing from conventional, isolated embedded systems with fixed functions to a new category of flexible intelligent systems. While 10 years ago VC was still developing smart cameras based on TI-DSP with their own operating system and image processing library, we now rely on various ARM processor types with a Linux operating system for our products, and recently even camera modules with a MIPI-CSI-2 interface. This combination of technologies can now be described as the standard in the embedded sector. The market offers an incredible number of software libraries and ready-to-use tools for this.