Digital Acceleration and Future of Engineering

In the latest edition of our Digital Products for Growth Newsletter, we explore how AI, robotics, and IIoT are revolutionising the engineering sector, uncovering opportunities and challenges in this era of digital transformation

  • Spork Digital
  • 8 min

Key Takeaways

  1. Selective Adoption of Robotics: While we are seeing many industries adopting robotics in different ways, the scale of that adoption varies widely. Factors such as labour costs, production volume, and task complexity all come into play when it comes time to decide where and how to implement robotic solutions.
  2. IIoT and Predictive Maintenance: More and more, connected devices are being used for faster, more thorough data collection and analysis, enabling better predictive maintenance and improving efficiency.
  3. Challenges in Technology Integration: The connectivity mentioned above, worries about software updates, data security and the integration of new technologies with legacy systems and traditional practices are all posing significant challenges in getting buy-in in some sectors.
  4. AI’s Growing Impact: We discussed applications for AI in everything from object recognition in autonomous mowers to generative design in architecture. But adoption is gradual, seemingly focused on specific use cases, making its use feel more situational rather than transformative.
  5. Human-AI Collaboration: As we have seen in previous sector discussions about the advancements in AI and robotics, human expertise remains crucial in engineering and construction, especially for complex decision-making and contextual understanding of data and processes.

For this latest issue of our Digital Products for Growth newsletter, we brought together a panel with diverse engineering backgrounds to discuss the impact of technologies like AI, robotics, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) on their particular businesses and how those technologies are transforming engineering disciplines generally. We found things that surprised us, intrigued us and sparked ideas for the future. We think you’ll find the same.

Selective Adoption of Robotics

From autonomous mowers in agricultural settings to robotic arms in auto manufacturing, the shift towards automation is palpable. But the implementation of robotics in engineering and manufacturing also varies significantly across industries and geographic regions.

While some sectors, such as automotive manufacturing, have embraced robotics extensively, others are more selective in their adoption. Factors influencing this decision include:

  • Labour costs and availability
  • Production volume and variety
  • Task complexity and repeatability

While no one was surprised to hear how ubiquitous robotics was in the Chinese consumer experience, it’s fair to say that a number of the panel were surprised to hear that there was little sign of robotics in the Chinese factory setting, outside its automotive sector.

In China at the moment, there’s not many really big factories, unless it’s the China automotive companies, which are huge.And for smaller companies, robotics is too expensive. People are cheaper. People are more flexible. In the past five years, I recall seeing just one factory using a welding robot.

Mark Burnett

So, in countries with lower labour costs, the economic incentive for automation may be less pressing. Switch your focus to countries with higher labour costs and the robotic landscape changes.

The discussion also touched on industries requiring high precision and consistency, such as contact lens manufacturing where robotics play a crucial role and on how industries traditionally reliant on human labour are exploring robotic solutions for specific tasks, to free up human resources for more complex, value-added tasks.

But for now widespread robotic adoption across the wider construction and manufacturing sectors would appear to remain slow and steady rather than high-speed and explosive.

In China or India, jobs that could be done by a robot are done by people because they are cheaper and more flexible. It’s in countries with higher labour costs that you see more automation…

Tom Pascall

Harnessing the Power of IIoT

These are machines of work, machines that need to do a job, and the uptime is absolutely massive. If you can get early warning signs that something’s going – the motor’s got accelerated wear, it’s running outside of a set of boundaries – if that can all be communicated remotely, then you can get ahead of the game when you’re looking to do preventative maintenance and keep these machines running.

Lee Kristensen
Digital Acceleration and Future of Engineering - Spork