Pinto's List: 10 new technologies for industrial automation

Most new technologies originate from developments in the military (low volume, high cost) or commercial (high volume, low cost) markets. For industrial automation markets, products typically involve medium volume and medium cost. Hence, automation products should take advantage of new technology from both military and commercial markets to utilize in industrial applications.

From a review of various forecasts, here is my list of 10 technologies that industrial automation products and systems could and should utilize:

• Wireless networks: Lots of small, cheap, low-power wireless devices proliferating in the plant and connecting all traditional "field" instruments.
• MEMS-tiny, low-cost, low-power sensors: Battery-powered sensors that (coupled with wireless networks) monitor products, processes, machines, and almost everything else in the factory.
• Wireless PDAs: For everything in the factory, plant, or process - communications, calibration, diagnostics, maintenance, windows to the plant network.
• RFID: Physical items with cheap chip labels you can read from up to 60 feet away, used for all kinds of factory ID, inventory tracking, logistics.
• Robotics and mechatronics: Labor-saving mechanisms for the factory and plant environments, cheaper and more affordable.
• Displays: More LCD displays in automation products of all kinds for easier programming and user diagnostics; built-in HMI.
• Lighting: LEDs producing more and purer light, changing color, using a tenth as much power, and lasting thousands of times longer than incandescent lights. Many more applications in sensors, actuators, and a variety of automation products.
• Telematics: Some automobile gadgets extending to automation products in the factory and process plant.
• Peer-to-peer and grid computing: Sharing unused computing power, significant growth of peer-to-peer I/O.
• Solar power: Organic compounds that mix up and spread out like paint-used in tank farms and outdoor equipment.