Manufacture Equipment Retrofit to Allow Usage in the Industry 4.0

Abstract

Industry 4.0 brings a new productive period, in which companies that do not have its machinery updated and compatible with the precepts of the advanced manufacture will have difficulties to survive in this new competitive environment. This work proposes retrofit techniques alternatives to allow old automation and mechatronic components such as robotic arms and CNC machines to be reused in the new industrial revolution with low implementation cost, adapting them to advanced manufacturing. For the development of the techniques, the machines existent in an academic plant were used. A virtual commissioning was performed for previous validation of the plant operational layout. Then embedded computational platforms, off-the-shelf microcontrollers and programming techniques were used to modify the machinery communication interfaces, allowing the development of intelligence and remote communication. The alternatives were efficient and cost-effective.