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One of Omron’s main focuses with respect to sensor innovation is to incorporate more “intelligence” – that is to say, more ways to gather meaningful data – into their latest sensor lines. Smarter sensors mean better insights into what’s really going on at the machine level, and these insights lead to better decision-making and less downtime. Setup, predictive maintenance, and reconfiguration are all great ways to use IO-Link.

What will the factory of the future look like? This is the question that many professionals in the automation and manufacturing industries are seeking to answer. While most proposed descriptions are lofty yet lacking in concrete details, there are also many attempts to extrapolate from cutting-edge technologies that already exist. What needs to be done is to connect the grandiose vision with the minutiae, and its sweeping (and yet unrealized) capabilities with today’s real-world applications that sit right on the boundary between practical and experimental.

For manufacturers looking to get started with the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), a common question that comes up is whether they should use the edge or the cloud for data analysis purposes. However, this doesn’t have to be an either-or choice. In fact, both strategies are optimized to fit different needs and can work well together. Some manufacturers don’t want their data going into the cloud for proprietary reasons.