Advanced Product Design for Industry 4.0

The world of product development, manufacturing, and production is changing. With Industry 4.0, we’re on the brink of a new dawn in automation and intelligence, with smart, connected products and the smart factories that produce them.

Autonomous drones capture progress as a new production cell layout is commissioned. Deep learning-enabled devices with computer vision perform quality checks on the production line and feed back data to continually improve processes. Intelligent, collaborative robots that are “aware” of their environment work alongside humans to assist with assembly tasks.

Advanced computing devices harvest huge amounts of data from products in the field to feed design and simulation systems and help ensure that next-generation products learn from those that have gone before.

Virtual reality (VR) presents everyone in the development process with the information they need in a rich, immersive, and collaborative environment. Ultra-powerful workstations are used to design, simulate, and visualize products, production cells, and factories.

Then, once manufactured, virtual products or “digital twins” can be connected to their real-world manifestations.

At the heart of all of these processes is NVIDIA, playing a strategic role in empowering the manufacturing industry to implement Industry 4.0. Over the past 20 years, sustained investments in R&D have resulted in NVIDIA continually pushing the boundaries of graphics processing unit (GPU) technology. This innovation extends far beyond simply powering computer graphics displays and design software.

Now, a wide range of software and hardware solutions from NVIDIA are enabling manufacturers to develop artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for industrial collaborative robots and autonomous vehicles in the smart factory. These solutions will provide secure access to data at any time from anywhere on any device, with fully interactive 3D graphics, and deliver the compute power required for big data analysis.

In the realm of advanced product design for Industry 4.0, the NVIDIA® Quadro® visual computing platform helps product design teams radically transform the traditional product development process. This includes the leading-edge technologies like AI, VR, interactive physically based rendering, real-time engineering simulation, and 3D graphics virtualization needed to develop the next generation of smart, connected products.