Manufacturing in motion: The future of factory logistics

With every issue of ABB Review, I present stories that not only inform but inspire—articles that offer a fresh perspective, challenge paradigms, and imagine possibilities.

_{Andreas Moglestue, Chief Editor, ABB Review}

Today I would like to take you on journey through the future of manufacturing. And when I call this a journey, I mean it quite literally: I will explore with you how goods will move around inside the factory of the future, first on the production line and then in the warehouse. Finally, we will consider how the data communications that coordinate this all can be kept secure.

Movement in manufacturing

When we think of production lines, we often think of the conveyor belt. Conveyor belts are very useful in workflows producing highly uniform output, especially if manufacturing can be subdivided into a series of tasks of equal duration.

Not all manufacturing workflows fit this description. Consumers are demanding more customization and more choice, and this means factories need to produce differently.

Imagine a factory where items move individually carried on shuttles. Rather than a conveyor imposing a rigid speed on all work stages, items move as and when required. The line can branch out permitting parallel work stages, or to allow steps to be by-passed or additional steps added. 

This system is ACOPOStrak, a system presented in ABB Review 01/2025. 

Building adaptive solutions: Heading for high speed flexible mechatronic production lines

Vision with variables

Production lines are not the only things that move in factories. The best manufacturing process would fail without appropriate logistics. Components must be in the right place at the right time. We are probably all familiar with warehouse automation, in which items can be retrieved by robots and without human intervention. The sad truth is that only six percent of warehouses use mobile robots.

Why?

Roboticized warehouses require expensive scanners and furthermore demand the warehouse to be precisely structured with well-defined tasks. Many warehouses do not offer such conditions. Layouts may change frequently depending on the goods being handled, and robots need to coexist with people and the objects they are moving.

ABB recently acquired the Swiss startup Sevensense Robotics AG. The solution employed is called Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (Visual SLAM), a 3-D scanning system supported by artificial intelligence. The environment is perceived in real time, and even ramps and uneven floors do not present a problem. This technology is presented in ABB Review 01/2025.

Seeing with AI: Flexible navigation in dynamic environments

Securely connected

The third aspect I would like to present to you is not concerned with moving goods, but with moving data. With the rising use of sensors, the adoption of cloud-based storage and analytics, as well as the increased adoption of AI, external network connections are indispensable. But such connections open the factory to cyber vulnerabilities. How do we balance the high security needs of manufacturing with the need to be connected?

This precisely is the topic of the buzzword demystifier article of ABB Review 01/2025.

Buzzword demystifier: Industry 4.0 cyber security

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