Short Introduction to the Internet of Things (IoT)
Smart homes and cities, Industry 4.0, drones and more
Have you ever wondered how our life in the future may look like? What technology will bring us? How will it influence our lifestyle? Let us look at one possible scenario.
Smart Homes
It’s Saturday morning, automatic window curtains open when your alarm clock goes off. You open your eyes and your voice assistant Amazon Alexa welcomes you and briefly summarizes your today’s schedule. Meantime a smart cafe machine starts preparing your favorite café Americano and a toast roaster heats two slices of bread for your breakfast. When you go under the digital shower the intelligent system remembers your preferred temperature, plays morning music in the background and later during teeth brushing a magic mirror displays emails you received overnight alongside with news highlights, plus the current weather forecast. You are ready to go out.
Because you planned some morning exercises a self-driving car brings you to the gym adjusting driving style and selecting carefully chosen (AI-based) motivational music. The same time it performs a self-check to find if any part needs a replacement or repair and, if so, system finds and arranges a time slot in a car garage that fits your calendar.
After you arrive at the gym, the intelligent equipment inside remember your results from the last visit and after analyzing data from your smartphone how active you were meantime it optimizes today’s training plan accordingly. Thanks to various biomedical sensors installed in your clothing it also checks your health status to make sure you are fine.
If something is out of norms you would get a notification to your smartphone that you should consult a doctor. Then, if you want you can upload him all data from all your systems before the visit: from gym equipment, intelligent clothes, smartphone and even from a coffee machine (so he knows how much coffee you drink). The diagnosis can be done fully remotely then.
Finally, after you came back home you order a pizza that, still hot, within few minutes arrives at your house delivered by a drone. You chill out in front of a smart TV watching a movie that Netflix carefully selected for you. Your house goes into a cinema mode: curtain closes, lights are dimmed, their colour changes and your smartphone go automatically into “do not disturb” mode.
Nice, isn’t it? And this is not so distant future. Most of these systems are currently available or under development. As you see all of them are based on nice and smooth cooperation between people and some kind of an intelligent system (like a smart home). And this intelligent system is possible thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT). Simply speaking it is a network of various interconnected devices that exchange data to perform some more sophisticated action that each is unable to do separately.
But even now there are many devices connected, so what’s so special and different about IoT?
Currently, although the Internet indeed connects technically computers and smartphones it’s focused on connecting people more than devices. You have to write and send an email; request a delivery from an online shop, you have to check when they play the next Batman movie, in which cinema and if it fits your calendar. There is almost always some human interaction required. However, IoT is more about data that devices exchange automatically between themselves with no or minimum human interaction. Intelligent data analysis systems allow not only to simply automating tasks in form of “if-then” but to optimize processes on its own and take appropriate actions (e.g. selecting the best car’s route to work considering current traffic). Sure, they are ultimately created for people but this time with a minimal human effort required. Here thing like Big Data, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence plays a significant role.
Smart Cities
IoT systems are not only intelligent houses or self-driving cars. These systems can be easily scaled up to the various sizes so they can, for example, encompass processes in the entire production company or integrate and optimize the functioning of a city (smart cities) or even a bigger region. In a city this can take a form of adapting speed limits and traffic lights, sending notifications about free parking spots. Cities like New York, London and Amsterdam started already the development of smart infrastructure. KPMG prepared a nice report about how IoT works in smart cities if you want to go a bit deeper into this topic.
For a bigger region, this can be monitoring, predicting and optimizing energy management by using the so-called Smart Grid system. It activates, deactivates or redirects electricity based on the current and future demand. This leads to reduced pollution and costs.
Industry 4.0
In the industry, IoT comes in a context of new technological revolution, so-called Revolution 4.0 (leading to Industry 4.0). It is something more than the automation of processes itself. It’s a new business opportunity. The speed at which companies must operate in a global economy is huge. Modern factories produce a massive volume of data and till now most of them had to be processed manually by employees. At some point, people are not able to or handle all of them on process them on time. IoT is crucial in tackling this problem.
A modern production company with such a system may have all the machines, even in various locations, connected, to warehouses, a design office and various management systems. It will generate not only real-time KPIs and allow steering the entire process remotely. Smart manufacturing allows leveraging data to optimize the process. This not only reduces time wasted in the system but also allows shortening the product introduction lifecycle.
For example, a German car manufacturer Volkswagen together with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is going to develop Volkswagen Industrial Cloud. This project aims to combine data from all manufacturing plants into one cloud-based intelligent system leading to significant improvements to the company’s processes, including production, logistics and sales.
Not only huge corporations like VW can afford such an investment. Polish company Amica (a producer of household goods) is introducing IoT step-wise. The first step was the full automation of warehouses. The next steps are intelligent data platform for marketing, finance, logistics and finally automation of complex manufacturing processes.
IoT is not reserved only for manufacturing companies. transport and logistic ones, that operate a fleet of vehicles like trucks or planes, always try to minimise the time they are not in use. Every hour out of service is a loss for them. These companies can benefit from Predictive Maintenance. A Swedish trucks manufacturer Volvo introduced such a system for their products. Thanks to hundreds of sensors and machine learning algorithms they can predict when and what parts have to be repaired or replaced before a failure will occur during service.
In summary, intelligent manufacturing processes deliver to customers’ better products and services tailored to their needs (e.g. furniture size, personalized clothing, or car interiors). This gives a manufacturer an additional edge over the competition by increasing profitability and delivering to customers better products. This is why it is currently a hot topic overall in the industry.
Military
The military sector is always interested in the newest technologies and is ready to spend a significant amount of money to develop them. Have you ever watched Ironman? Currently, a winner on a battlefield is not the one who has only more soldier but who has the better equipped, informed and coordinate. In a data-driven warfare ability to obtain and process data from the various dispersed system will give an army a significant advantage. Data coming from satellites, drones, radars and remote sensors allow reacting to enemy actions before they endanger our forces. These systems can save solders lives by for example detecting terrorist planting IEDs or preparing an ambush.
More details
How does IoT architecture look like? From components is it composed from and how can they be connected? How data can be acquired, processed and what used for? These questions I will answer in the upcoming articles.
