IEN Predictions: What We Said in 1983

The Factory of the Future: Predictions Made By IEN Editors in 1983

Factory of the Future

Will be totally unmanned and automatic
Group technology principles will prevail. Production will be organized in manufacturing cells, i.e., units comprising both processing and transfer machinery to produce families of similar parts
Machines and devices will become not only self-reliant, but also “sociable”
Totally self-correcting vertical milling machines will produce parts that require no inspection whatsoever
Adaptive Control
- An increasing number of machine tools will come under adaptive control
- The number of variables controlled in this way will increase to include part geometry, surface smoothness, sensor position, tool wear and tool failure

Robots

Adaptive industrial robots and machine controls will be developed
Robots will have greater intelligence, aided by sensors capable of detecting variations
They will have the ability to react conditionally to sensory information
Greater intelligence will enable cooperation among robots and with programmable machines in complex ways
More capable sensory equipment
More powerful microprocessors
More complex languages
Language standardization
Further “physical” evolution – self changing-end effectors and/or development of the end-effector into something like a hand

Sensors

Continuing development of sensors small and rugged enough to operate in “unfriendly” locations, such as on the spindle of a high-speed drill
Tool-failure sensors with self-repair capabilities
Use of sensors to duplicate human sensory faculties, especially for automated inspection and robot assembly, will increase.

Programmable Controllers

Use of programmable controllers will increase the sociability of machines
Future control systems will consist of micro-programmable controllers controlling the smallest items of equipment, under the direction of larger programmable controllers controlling elaborate groupings of process and transfer equipment, which form the manufacturing cells of the operation
Coordination could be done by peer-to-peer communication between programmable controllers, which would at the same time function as two-way links, between devices or cells and the general flow of manufacturing information
The most important developments are likely to come in the field of compatibility, i.e., in 1983 there were many programmable controller networks on the market, but most of them apparently could not communicate with each other.

Computers

Data communications improvements
Growth of computer capacity
Self-reliance of individual devices
Developments in man-machine interaction
Machines working with one another under central control, incorporating small computers into ever tinier devices
Optical computer
- The final step in smoothing the flow of manufacturing information would be to make the information-processing machines themselves operate with photons rather than electrons
- Prediction that experiments under way were “likely to bear fruit within the next 20 years”
- The brain at the center of the hierarchical control network of the Factory of the Future and in smaller versions at its peripheries will be not an electronic computer but an optical one
- Beams of laser radiation will replace electric currents in performing all the arithmetic, logic and storage functions

Optical Fiber Systems

Will provide an economical high-capacity interference- and error-free means of information transfer, to replace expensive and bulky copper wires that were “endless sources of interference which can degrade electronic communications.”
Optical communications will make possible continuous data paths, or data highways, if necessary tens of thousands of feet long, with access ways distributed at will through the entire bio-directional communications system, assuring the utmost flexibility of computer integrated plant operations.
Aside from compatibility with optical communications systems, there will be a number of other advantages:
- Vast increases in speed
- Switching operations with optical analogues of transistors takes only a trillionth of a second versus a billionth of a second with electronic devices
- Future optical computers could run a thousand times faster than the fastest electronic computers.

Read the 1983 Predictions article by IEN's editors.