Customer:
One of the world’s most renowned suppliers of industrial drives and gearboxes for motion control, power transmission, rack & pinion applications and servo motors. For more than 8 decades, our customer has been a trusted supplier of quality and efficient Industrial Automation solutions
Business Challenge:
- A PC-based application was being used by the end-users to control industrial drives of the motors connected to the machines, on the shop-floor.
- However our customer’s internal technology R&D team had concerns w.r.t to their existing features and HMI of the PC-based Industrial Automation application.
- This PC application was being used by their customers to control industrial drives of the motors connected to the machines on the shop-floor.
- Operator-centric HMI design and Web or Mobile based solutions are very critical since manual operation of the industrial drives can lead to fatal physical injuries on the shop floor or assembly line
- For the existing product line of the industrial drives, the customer had a legacy web-based PC application along with physical controls on the drives and gearboxes.
- This legacy industrial automation application had a number of limitations:
- Existing HMI design & industrial automation solution supported limited controls and hence operators were also required to use the physical controls of the drive. This increased the possibility of shop-floor accidents
- The legacy industrial automation app did not provide effective illustration and visual feedback of the actual working environment and condition of the deployed motors.
Embitel Solution:
- Our Industrial Automation and Mobility team partnered with the customer for technology workshops to understand the existing processes and pain points.
- Automation and Mobility team proposed and developed a Mobile App with an operator-centric HMI design, remote monitoring and custom control features.
- This Industrial Automation Mobile Solution not only provides feedback from the drive controller, but also is used to relay control commands to the drive controllers to adjust position of the motor axes, speed, torque and more.
- The Mobile App solution for Industrial Drives ensured safer proximity to the actual drives and motors as compared to the legacy PC-application where there is no visual feedback.
- To overcome the drawbacks of the PC-application that required LAN connection with the industrial drives, mobile app helped operators to connect with drives and motors through highly secured Wi-Fi connection or unique QR codes.
- Operators can easily identify the industrial drive controllers connected to the Wi-Fi network and control any specific motor at permissible distance from the machine shops.
- Industrial Drive Mobile Application ensures that operators receive real time feedback from the deployed motors.
- Our Automation and Mobility developers have designed a highly secure, proprietary and industrial grade communication protocol to enable data exchange between the mobile app and industrial drive controllers.
- This solution has been designed for mobile operating systems like Android, iOS and Windows.
- All operator authenticity and validity checks for changing any parameter of the motors have been integrated.
- All the issues/events are notified to the operator through the mobile application as per the defined priorities shared by the customer.
Embitel Impact:
- This mobile app solution for Industrial Drive application ensures that all motor-related status are visible to the operator in real time, and hence chances of any unintended faulty handling and accidents are eliminated.
Tools and Technologies:
- Software development Languages :Java, swift, Objective C ,CSS, HTML5 and VC++ .
- Proprietary protocol developed is based on TCP/IP.
- Development Environment: Android studio, xCode, VS 2012 and Phonegap.
