More Chinese businesses, from steel plates and mobile phones to household appliances and rocket parts, are using artificial intelligence (AI) to power their production and have introduced “dark factories” with 24-hour uninterrupted and unattended production. Dark factories, also called smart factories, are entirely run by programmed robots with no need for lighting. They are expected to reduce labor costs, improve production efficiency and product quality, and carry out production under hazardous conditions to ensure worker safety.
To replace people with machines to do high-intensity, repetitive, tedious and dangerous work is an essential step toward smart manufacturing in China’s iron and steel industry. A dark factory of Baogang Group in Inner Mongolia uses robots to separate slag from molten steel. The slag discharge rate was reduced from 10% to 9%, and the one percentage point reduction could save nearly USD100,000 every year for the factory.
The Xi’an Aerospace Propulsion Institute – a research base for China’s solid-fuel rocket engines – achieved 24-hour production of rocket ignition parts. At night, automated equipment carries out the initial processing, while experienced workers give the finishing touches during the daytime. At a dark factory in Beijing, mechanical arms carefully pinch the two sides of a smartphone screen and fold it repeatedly like human hands. It requires more than 200 steps to make the foldable phone developed by Xiaomi, most of which are carried out by intelligent equipment. The dark factory has an annual production capacity of 1 million smartphones. Megvii, a Chinese AI unicorn, built a dark workshop for a household motor manufacturer in Zhejiang province. Xu Qingcai, Senior Vice President of Megvii, said it is typical for AI to empower traditional manufacturers to improve quality and efficiency. At the dark factory, Megvii deploys robots to lift cargo, and AI algorithms can also improve the recognition of stained and wrinkled QR codes. The dark factory also achieved the integration of multiple types of equipment and the interaction among the warehouse control system, the warehouse management system, enterprise resources planning and the production enforcement system. The intelligence of the dark factory is boosted by an AIoT (AI and the Internet of Things) logistics management platform called Hetu developed by Megvii. It can learn and adapt the production site to conduct management and supervision of the equipment.
At the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July, Xiao Yaqing, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, said that China’s AI development had made remarkable progress in industrial applications with deepening integration of AI technologies and real economy businesses, the China Daily reports. The output of industrial robots in Shenzhen witnessed a 75.5% year-on-year growth in the first seven months, while the growth rate in the heavily industrialized city of Dongguan was 123.3% year-on-year in the first half. The output value of industrial robots in Shenzhen reached CNY90.4 billion in 2020, up 9.98% from 2019. The growth was 7.65 percentage points higher than that of the previous year. More than 15,000 industrial enterprises are engaged in digital transformation using industrial internet technology, and over 500,000 companies have adopted cloud computing technology.
