Taiwan’s leading consumer electronics giants are making advances with AI automation for manufacturing, as fleets of robots and millions of cameras and sensors drive efficiencies across the smart factories of the future.
Dozens of electronics manufacturing and automation specialists — including Foxconn, Pegatron and Wistron — are showcasing their use of the NVIDIA software at COMPUTEX, in Taipei, and are called out in NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address.
Companies displayed the latest in computer vision and generative AI using NVIDIA Metropolis for everything from automating product manufacturing to improving worker safety and device performance.
Creating Factory Autonomy
With increasing production challenges, manufacturers are seeing a need to turn factories into autonomous machines, with generative AI and digital twins as a foundation. AI agents — driven by large language models (LLMs) — are being built that can talk and assist on warehouse floors to boost productivity and increase safety. And digital twins are helping manufacturers simulate and develop factories and AI-powered automation before being deployed in real factories.
Foxconn and its Ingrasys subsidiary use NVIDIA Omniverse and Metropolis to build digital twins for factories, planning efficiency optimizations and worker safety improvement at a number of manufacturing sites. At COMPUTEX, Foxconn is showing how it uses digital twins to plan placements of many video cameras in factories to optimize its data capture for collecting key insights.
Bringing Generative AI to the Factory Floor
Generative AI is creating productivity leaps across industries. Researcher McKinsey forecasts that generative AI will deliver as much as $290 billion in value for the advanced manufacturing industry, while bringing $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.
At GTC in March, NVIDIA launched NVIDIA NIM, a set of microservices designed to speed up generative AI deployment in enterprises. Supporting a wide range of AI models, it ensures seamless, scalable AI inferencing, on premises or in the cloud, using industry-standard application programming interfaces.
Billions of IoT devices worldwide can tap into Metropolis and NVIDIA NIM for improvements in AI perception to enhance their capabilities.
Advancing Manufacturing With NVIDIA NIM
Linker Vision, an AI vision insights specialist, is adopting NVIDIA NIM to assist factories in deploying AI agents that can respond to natural language queries.
The Taipei company uses NVIDIA Visual Insight Agent (VIA) in manufacturing environments for always-on video feed monitoring of factory floors. With user prompts, these ChatGPT-like systems can enable operators to ask for video of factory floors to be monitored for insights and safety alerts, like when workers are not wearing hardhats.
Operators can ask questions and receive instant, context-aware responses from AI agents, which can tap into organizational knowledge via retrieval-augmented generation, an integration of AI that can enhance operational efficiency.
Leading manufacturer Pegatron has factories that span more than 20 million square feet and the facilities process and build more than 15 million assemblies per month, while deploying more than 3,500 robots across factory floors. It has announced efforts based on NVIDIA NIM and is using Metropolis multi-camera tracking reference workflows to help with worker safety and productivity on factory lines. Pegatron’s workflow fuses digital twins in Omniverse and Metropolis real-time AI to better monitor and optimize operations.
Boosting Automated Visual Inspections
Adoption of NVIDIA Metropolis is helping Taiwan’s largest electronics manufacturers streamline operations and reduce cost as they build and inspect some of the world’s most complex and high-volume products.
Quality control with manual inspections in manufacturing is a multitrillion-dollar challenge. While automated optical inspection systems have been relied upon for some time, legacy AOI systems have high false detection rates, requiring costly secondary manual inspections for verification.
NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories offers a state-of-the-art AI reference workflow for bringing sophisticated and accurate AOI inspection applications to production faster.
TRI, Taiwan’s leading AOI equipment maker, has announced integrating NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories workflow and capabilities into its latest AOI systems and is also planning to use NVIDIA NIM to further optimize system performance.
Wistron is expanding its OneAI platform for visual inspection and AOI with Metropolis. OneAI has been deployed in more than 10 Wistron factories globally, spanning hundreds of inspection points.
MediaTek, a leading innovator in connectivity and multimedia, and one of Taiwan’s largest IoT silicon vendors, announced at COMPUTEX that it’s teaming with NVIDIA to integrate NVIDIA TAO training and pretrained models into its AI development workflow for IoT device customers. The collaboration brings Metropolis and the latest advances in AI and visual perception to billions of IoT far-edge devices and streamlines software development for MediaTek’s next phase of growth in edge IoT.
Learn about NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories, NVIDIA NIM and the NVIDIA Metropolis multi-camera tracking workflow, which developers can use to build state-of-the-art real-time locating services and worker safety into their factory or warehouse operations.