At a dark factory in Beijing, mechanical arms carefully pinch the two sides of a smartphone screen and fold it repeatedly like human hands. It requires more than 200 steps to make the foldable phone developed by Xiaomi Corp, most of which are carried out by intelligent equipment. According to the company, the dark factory has an annual production capacity of 1 million smartphones.

Megvii, a Chinese AI unicorn, built a dark factory model workshop for a household motor manufacturer in Zhejiang province.

Xu Qingcai, senior vice-president of Megvii, told reporters that it is typical for AI to empower traditional manufacturers to improve quality and efficiency.

Xu said a smart upgrade includes three aspects. First is the intelligence of a single device. At the dark factory in Zhejiang, Megvii deploys robots to lift cargo. With QR codes and navigation, the robots can accurately locate cargo, and the robots can be easily operated. AI algorithms can also improve the recognition rate of stained and wrinkled QR codes. Therefore, the factory does not need to change new QR codes frequently.

The second is the intelligence of the system. The dark factory in Zhejiang achieved the integration of multiple types of equipment and realized the interaction among the warehouse control system, the warehouse management system, enterprise resources planning and the production enforcement system.

The third is the intelligence at the facility. AI at a specific production site can perceive, think, execute and evolve. The brain of the household motor dark factory is an AIoT(AI and the internet of things) logistics management platform called Hetu developed by Megvii. It can learn and adapt the production site to conduct management and supervision of the equipment and production line as well as allocate various tasks to the machines.

At the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July, Xiao Yaqing, minister of industry and information technology, said that China's AI development had made remarkable progress in industrial applications with deepening integration of AI technologies and real economy businesses.

Xinhua