Embedded Software for the IoT

12Statistical process control

12.1Introduction

As described in the Introduction, “Industry 4.0” has two main pillars. One pillar is the connectivity of manufacturing robots and machines. The other pillar is a higher degree of autonomy.

It makes sense that with billions of devices connected to the internet, we cannot expect them all to send raw data somewhere else for decision making. If the devices utilize their smarter CPUs, they can take decisions locally. This is faster and saves energy and bandwidth, and thereby costs. In many ways, this is also a more secure solution. Chapter 11 shows how the amount of data can be reduced by filtering sampled signals. In this chapter, we see how we can avoid a lot of communication and latency in manufacturing, ...