A smart platform to control water quality in Alaska and save Beluga whales, smart home gate capable of opening at the owner’s arrival or transforming your garage into a giant letterbox for online shopping deliveries, a real-time analysis and 3D printing solution to design and produce in-store custom made shoes within a couple of hours, a fully connected and sensorized fire truck capable of measuring resources, and a powerful platform capable of provisioning any device to any platform in just seconds. These are some of the projects to will feature at the 2018 Internet of Things (IoT) Solutions World Congress Testbed Area. Held at Fira de Barcelona from 16 to 18 October, the event will display 10 testbeds showing how the IoT will reshape the global economy.
The use IoT technology will help save Beluga whales in Alaska. Zaragoza-based company Libelium will take part in the testbed area with a solution developed for the Government of Alaska together with Aridea Solutions is to monitor air and water quality after a gas leak at the Cook Inlet, home of the endangered Beluga Whale, through a sensorized buoy platform. The wireless sensor system allows monitorization of pollution levels in air and water near the leak affecting the Beluga whales and other aquatic mammals. This an example of how IoT can help the conservation of marine habitat and protected species with IoT technology is helping to reduce pole warming and consequent climate change.
The smart door testbed developed by Marantec and Guh will showcase a system capable of logically responding to different situations once deployed. Doors are capable of ventilating the property if suggested by temperature and humidity sensors, combining its action with lighting control systems already in place, notifying the service technician of the exact type of error experienced, integrating a post delivery service to transform a garage into a letterbox or even installing cheap consumer charging stations into private garages and making the private garage/charging point available for the public, too.
Danish footwear brand ECCO partners with Dassault Systèmes, the 3Dexperience Company leading the path towards sustainable innovations, will launch a data-driven experience where individual bio-mechanical data is combined with additive manufacturing to create customized shoes in the store. Through wearable sensors and in only 30 seconds, 3D scanners determine the individual orthotic fit and create a custom midsole, which is the functional heart of the shoe. Within a few hours, the customized midsoles will be materialized for selected shoes. This 3D print footwear project is disrupting the consumer goods industry, pushing the boundaries of product customization and the consumer experience.
Public and worker safety
The third testbed will showcase a smart fire truck developed by Emergency One together with Vodafone, equipped with a set of solutions that allow the automation of a series of tasks in the control panel. While RFID tags, sensors & hardware ensure all the vital equipment is on board, water sensors measure tank capacity and how much water was used in an incident. The vehicle can also report when the blue lights and sirens are on, ensuring that the teams are covered from an insurance perspective. When required, the data collected from all the sensor points on the vehicles means a post event report can be created centrally showing who was on board, how long an incident was attended for and other data required.
Improving worker safety is the main goal of the testbed presented by Wipro, Guardhat, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Aruba Networks that uses industrial IoT technologies to improve worker safety while facilitating safety compliance and enabling safe work operations. The testbed solution accomplishes this by employing smart wearables such as connected hardhats and infrastructure, cognitive learning abilities, and 24×7 connectivity with operations command centers and emergency response teams.
Heavy industry and manufacturing
The steel industry will be on the spotlight in one of the selected testbeds. Celsa Group, together with IThinkUPC and Nexiona have developed a data-driven Steel 4.0 IIoT deployment for Intelligent Monitoring of Meltshop & Rolling Mill processes by means of multivariate analysis and modelling applying AI techniques to automatically and continuously diagnose and predict the outcome of industrial processes and automatically prescript recommendations to improve production and avoid unwanted effects to plant engineers and supervisors.
The Chelpipe Group and Zyfra will showcase an innovative digital advisor for pipe-rolling production that ensures the quality of the product. The Digital Advisor is a recommendations system for industrial enterprises that harnesses the power of AI and Big Data and presents to the operators a specific guide to achieve the target parameters (energy efficiency, quality, productivity) of every work. Moreover, the implementation of the Advisor is possible without capital costs, and its effectiveness becomes evident one month after the introduction due to high reliability and simplicity.
Hirotec together with PTC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OSIsoft and National Instruments will show attendees a fully functional assembly line to showcase the factory of the future equipped with a combination of IoT technologies working together. The testbed includes a robot, pneumatics and conveyor systems, vision control system and a number of secondary sensors which provide real-time readings of critical parameters.
Orion innovation will exhibit a disruptive indoor positioning solution capable of provide highly precise 3D localization. While current solutions cannot provide accuracy under 1m due to their poor reliability, limited resolution, and large form factors, this new 3D wireless localization system uses radio signals of moderate 20MHz baseband bandwidth transmitted from each asset tag which are received by a set of stationary hubs with known positions.
Complex industrial IoT deployments combining sensors and cloud-based platforms are now almost as easy to set up as plug-and-play devices. Today it takes 20-40 minutes per IoT device to provision an IoT Device Management System in the Cloud and most require pre-configuration loading by original manufacturers or require a skilled security installer to manually configure it on-site. Mocana, together with Intel and ARM, have developed a system capable of setting up equipment and sensors and have them transmitting relevant data to any cloud-based platform within seconds after power-on.
Testbeds as examples of real use
Testbeds are experimental platforms designed to implement innovative solutions and test them in real-life operating conditions. These tests explore new technologies or combinations of existing ones with the aim of creating ground-breaking products or techniques with the potential to generate new international standards. The practical applications on show at the IoT Solutions World Congress (IoTSWC) will be coordinated and supervised by the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC).
IoTSWC is the leading event on the industrial internet and the digital transformation of business sectors, combining a congress, a commercial exhibition and test benches. Its next edition expects to gather together 300 exhibitors and 250 speakers from around the world. This year’s show is set to showcase the growth of the IoT and its widescale implementation across a range of industrial and business applications and will also demonstrate the convergence of this technology with artificial intelligence and blockchain. More than 13,000 professionals from 114 countries visited the IoTSWC 2017.
IOTSWC is a part of the Barcelona Industry Week, a platform organized by Fira de Barcelona to promote the so-called Industry 4.0 and its application in all sectors. In 2018 it comprises three events, Healthio, In(3Dustry From Needs to Solutions and IoT Solutions World Congress (IoTSWC).
