Transforming manufacturing at Haier

Since the early days of the 5G era, Huawei has been working with a range of partners to realize the full potential of the new wireless technology. This includes Haier --China’s largest producer of consumer electronics and home appliances-- and China Mobile. Together, the three have explored how to achieve the digital transformation of manufacturing.

To manufacturers, 5G offers extremely high reliability of machine connections, very low latency, a lot of bandwidth, and the ability to connect a high density of devices.  This paves the way for fitting a large number of sensors and cameras to equipment on the production floor, and uploading all this data to servers where AI makes sense of it all.

Smart manufacturing enables robots to perform more complex tasks

5G provides manufacturers with a lot of bandwidth —up to 20GBps— and latencies as low as 1 millisecond. Mobile edge computing, one of 5G’s main features, delivers extremely low-latency cloud computing.

Haier is headquartered in the city of Qingdao. It’s at a plant there that three partners have worked on developing smart solutions that could be deployed at Haier facilities throughout the world.

The solutions enable the implementation of high-performance machine vision in a manufacturing environment. Machine vision saves manufacturers costs by rapidly performing QC checks with over 99% accuracy, which is at least 10% more accurate than human inspection.

The three partners also developed technologies to boost safety. Unlike traditional video surveillance systems that only have a recording function, AI-surveillance can automatically create alarms in real time when it detects anomalies on the factory floor. The technology can identify non-authorized individuals, process safety violations, and workers who aren’t where they should be.

See what the Haier plant looks like!