Nearly a year after the release of "Made in China 2025", the concept level can be described as splendid, from industry 4.0, industrial informatization to intelligent manufacturing, unmanned factories, and now it extends to unmanned vehicles, unmanned ships, unmanned medical equipment In other popular fields, it seems that the era of industrial intelligence and unmannedization is imminent.

Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei Technologies, has made an objective judgment on this. He believes that this is the era of artificial intelligence, and industrial automation must be emphasized first; after industrial automation, it is possible to enter into informatization; only after informatization can intelligence be realized. China's industry has not yet completed automation, and there are still many industries that cannot even do semi-automation.

Therefore, before exploring Industry 4.0 and industrial unmannedization, it is necessary to understand the historical origin, technological origin and economic significance of related concepts.

In the 1980s, the U.S. auto industry feared being overwhelmed by Japanese competitors. In Detroit, many envisioned beating rivals with "lights out production." "Lights out production" is when factories are highly automated, the lights are off, and the robots are making the cars themselves. At the time, this idea was unrealistic, and the competitive advantage of Japanese car companies was not in automated production, but in "lean production" technology, which in most cases relied on human labor.

Today, advances in automation technology have gradually made "lights out production" a reality. Japanese robot maker FANUC has been able to leave some of its production lines unattended, running autonomously for weeks without incident.

Germany's Volkswagen aims to dominate the world, and the auto industry group has developed a new production strategy: the modular lateral moment. Volkswagen wants to use this new process to produce all models on the same production line. This process will eventually allow VW's factories around the world to adapt to local conditions and produce whatever model is required for the local market.

Many years ago, Qian Xuesen once said: "As long as the automatic control is done well, even if the components are close, the missile can hit the sky."

Today, automation will imitate human intelligence to a large extent. Robots have been applied in industrial production, ocean development, and space exploration. Expert systems have achieved remarkable results in medical diagnosis and geological exploration. Factory automation, office automation, home automation and agricultural automation will become an important part of the new technology revolution and develop rapidly.

On the whole, there is still a big gap between China's traditional industries and industrial powerhouses in terms of technical equipment, energy and raw material consumption, product quality and management level, especially the gap in technical equipment (such as high-end CNC machine tools) is expanding. . Large-scale equipment upgrades cannot be tolerated by the country; maintaining the status quo of equipment will lead to disastrous consequences. Only by applying automation technology to transform traditional industries can the quality of enterprises be most effectively improved.