Advantech’s ARK-3534B Edge Computer, available from ESIS, is being used to facilitate the smart sorting of steel.
The steel industry, as a high-energy-consuming sector, consistently ranks among the top emitters of carbon dioxide. Enhancing the comprehensive utilisation of scrap steel is a crucial pathway for the steel industry to achieve significant carbon reductions. According to Advantech, statistics indicate that using one tonne of recycled steel can reduce carbon emissions by approximately 1.6 tonnes.
Traditional sorting methods often rely on manual labour or mechanical separation systems that may not sort materials accurately. The customer’s implementation of the Smart Recycled Steel Grading 2.0 solution provides objective, fair and traceable grading results by integrating AI and robotic arms. This innovation represents a pivotal shift from exploratory deployment to industry-scale replication, delivering more accurate grading, broader application scenarios, and faster deployment for recycled steel grading processes.
The project challenges
Developing an AI-powered machine vision and robotic sorting system presented several challenges:
- Reliability and durability: The grading solution needed to be deployed on-site, requiring stable and reliable hardware capable of withstanding harsh industrial environments.
- Cost efficiency: The existing proof-of-concept setup used expensive rackmount servers. A more cost-effective solution was necessary for on-site AI inferencing, without sacrificing performance.
- Flexible configuration: Customisable hardware configurations were essential to adapt to various deployment scenarios.
Key requirements of the system
To address these challenges, the ideal robotic sorting system needed to offer:
- Comprehensive certification: A robust certification system to ensure compliance and reliability in demanding environments.
- AI high performance and expandability: Support for NVIDIA GPUs, desktop-grade multi-core CPUs, up to 64GB of memory and RAID data redundancy to ensure optimal AI performance.
- Durability: A finless design and features such as anti-vibration, shock resistance, wide voltage and wide temperature range capabilities to ensure a long product lifecycle.
- Flexibility and scalability: Modular and customisable options for seamless integration into diverse deployment scenarios.
The solution
The customer adopted Advantech’s ARK-3534B Edge Computer, equipped with an NVIDIA Tesla GPU card, as a cost-effective alternative to expensive rackmount servers. The solution provided:
- Compact yet powerful design: A smaller footprint, ideal for on-site deployment in diverse environments.
- Expandability: The system can integrate a sophisticated suite of IR sensors, including steel detectors, motors and cameras, to ensure precise classification.
- Flexibility: Configurable to meet specific on-site requirements, with support for multi-device clustering and hot standby for enhanced reliability.
- Cost efficiency: Reduced overall costs while maintaining or exceeding the performance of the previous server setup.
Outcomes of the project
Implementing the ARK-3534B Edge Computer significantly improved the customer’s scrap steel grading operations by:
- Ensuring consistent and accurate sorting.
- Lowering hardware costs without compromising performance.
- Delivering a robust, scalable solution that maintains system stability, even in demanding conditions.
- Accelerating the deployment and replication of the Smart Recycled Steel Grading 2.0 system, aiding the steel industry’s transition to greener practices.
ESIS Industrial Electronics offers a range of industrial computing solutions, including rugged tablets, data loggers, industrial displays, integrated computing platforms and programmable interfaces for direct PLC integration. Talk to us about solutions to keep your business operations running efficiently.
Article courtesy of Advantech.
