Industry 4.0 and energy: new innovation projects for Plain Concepts

At Plain Concepts, we are in luck. We have been awarded three R&D projects with which we will contribute to the development of Industry 4.0 and better energy service.

We explain what each consists of and how they can change the daily life of companies.

NEURON-DONES

The NEURON-DONES project is based on the industrial research of technologies to operate and maintain extensive scientific facilities for research in fusion energy, safe, sustainable, and inexhaustible power.

The IFMIF-DONES, an infrastructure for testing the materials with which future nuclear fusion reactors will be built, will be installed in this center. NEURON-DONES will generate solutions to improve the plant’s sustainability and safety and use artificial intelligence for intelligent operations management. There will also be data flow optimization projects.

The project is formed by a consortium of companies: Orolia, Cuerva, EAI, Enigmedia, Izertis, Negratín, Plain Concepts, and SENER. Plain Concepts will be responsible for developing a tool that allows the teleoperation of a high-precision hand using inverse reality and commercial virtual reality devices. It will also be in charge of researching and developing tools to control the evolution of the work through the analysis of 3D data, comparing the scanned model at each moment with the theoretical model.

Energy 4.0

‘Innovación, Resiliencia e Inteligencia al servicio de la Energía 4.0’ (‘Innovation, Resilience, and Intelligence at the service of Energy 4.0’) is the title of this project that seeks to develop technologies to improve the digitization of the electricity grid to become smart grids, in which the protagonists are programmable digital devices and software tools linked to Industry 4.0. The Energy 4.0 consortium is formed by the companies Cuerva, Soincon, Orolia, and Plain Concepts.

The project aims to drive the digitization of electricity grids (smart grids) using time synchronization as the driving force. In particular, electrical substations and transformation centers require replacing analog and power technologies with programmable digital devices and software tools aligned with the Industry 4.0 trend.

Plain Concepts will provide its expertise in automation to run them in electrical installations and ensure the security and management in the cloud of the information generated. Also, it will design a representation of critical infrastructure through augmented reality so that it can be seen through cell phones or HoloLens glasses. We have a great experience in Plain thanks to our industrial 3D graphics engine Evergine.

Auto Digital Twins

Digital twins are one of the most significant technological innovations in the industry. We have been awarded this research project that seeks to create a tool to facilitate the implementation of digital twins in industrial environments through automation. This project consists of three phases:

• Phase 1: Point Cloud to 3D automation. The Spot robot will be used with the Leica sensor to scan an industrial facility, and a point cloud will be obtained. A viewer with progressive rendering will be developed that can seamlessly display these large point clouds. Artificial intelligence algorithms will be implemented on point clouds to recognize complex objects, and, once identified, the 3D model will be obtained in an industry-standard format.
• Phase 2: synthetic data generator. This phase addresses the main problem of artificial intelligence models’ lack of data to recognize objects. To this end, a synthetic generator will be developed to create massively labeled virtual scenarios to train the artificial intelligence models.
• Phase 3: advanced capabilities. In this phase, the aim is to provide the system with more excellent stuff so that it is capable of recognizing the materials of objects (PVC, aluminum, steel, iron, and rubber) from the detection of textures, as well as their behavior (for example, the direction and speed of movement of a conveyor belt roller).

The consortium that will develop this project consists of Plain Concepts (which has already demonstrated its expertise in creating point clouds with Spot), Deuser, and TycheTools. The objective of the three phases is to facilitate labeling 3D elements that are part of industrial infrastructures. For this, Evergine will again be very useful.

We look forward to telling you more about the projects when they materialize – we are delighted and excited!