Exploring the world's first "textile + AI" workshop: "exciting" everywhere

(Technology Daily, Zouping, April 3) With the aid of AI technology, the original specialized knowledge can be mastered by ordinary people. The work that originally required ten people to complete now only needs one person. In the workshops of the world's largest textile company and the "World Top 500" Weiqiao Entrepreneur Group, the AI ​​technology that can be seen everywhere is not imaginary, but is aimed at the problem, closely related to the production process, and continuously generates value.

Spinning cotton into yarn, generally through the main processes of clearing, carding, stripping, combing, drawing, spinning, packaging. In the past, these processes relied on “human sea tactics”, and hundreds of spinning workers were turning around a bunch of machines. But the involvement of high technology has changed the traditional model – thanks to the intelligent production line of 125,000 spindles, all the spinning processes here are automated.

Entering the workshop, the neatly arranged equipment is running in an orderly manner, but few people walk around. Instead, they are “robots” everywhere, and they are becoming the protagonists in the workshop. For example, the most intuitive packaging link. As one of the main links in the spinning industry, packaging was originally synonymous with “hard work and tiredness”. However, this workshop built a track with a length of 35 kilometers, and the roving was automatically put into storage from the first floor to the second floor. The whole process was directly involved without any manual.

Behind the visible changes, the invisible brain is at work.

“In the entire production line, we installed 150,000 sensors, collected all the first-line data, and then carried out intelligent analysis. The results can be fed back to the system to automatically adjust the production process.” Zhang Hongxia, Chairman of Weiqiao Textile, told the Science and Technology Daily reporter For example: workers in the fine yarn workshop, now only 6 people in a class, one person has to look after 20,000 spindles, which was previously unthinkable, because 60 people were used before, and one person took care of 2-3 spindles at most. A more intuitive comparison of the data is: the number of workers used in every 10,000 spindles in the textile industry is 100, but at least 10 people are used in Weiqiao Textile.

How smart is the intelligent spinning production line equipped with the “smart brain”? Chen Yijun, director of the Weiqiao Textile Production Control Center, told this reporter: "We will use big data, cloud computing, Internet and other technologies to visually monitor each process and operation point of spinning, and track the progress and quality of orders through the Internet. At the same time, the generated real-time data is integrated and analyzed to counteract production management."

Min Min is the champion of the professional yarn competition in the national textile industry. According to the past, her eyesight and experience have made her stand out. "The spinning wheel in our workshop has 480 spindles. I can see 30 vehicles in total, with a total of 14,400 spindles. The fine yarn money is easy to 'break the head' during the drawing process, which will cause the cotton yarn on the corresponding spindle to be wasted, which is to be discovered by the worker's eyesight and experience."

But in the face of intelligent production lines, her advantage "weakened" - in dealing with "broken heads", machines with "smart brains" are more reliable than people.

In fact, in addition to the “broken head”, a major problem that plagues spinning companies, there is still a phenomenon in the spinning industry: spinning requires high demands on the workshop environment, such as the need for bright lighting, and the temperature of the workshop is always maintained at 28 Below Celsius, the humidity is kept within 55%-65% to ensure product quality.

"Production automation", "control system intelligence", "online monitoring and intelligentization", the realization of "three-oriented" solves the above two major problems, and even achieves the production state of "light-off production, continuous weaving". Just like the "needle-eye" that is practiced in the dark, the high-tech without the use of lighting has completed all kinds of actions that the most skilled textile workers can't do, thus creating the first "light-out workshop" in the global spinning industry. .

Industrial transformation and upgrading , the "dividend" to AI technology is the mainstream of the development of many industries. However, the development of things is always two-sided. The downside is that as production efficiency increases, a large number of labor forces are streamlined.

“In the textile industry, 90% of the employed population is migrant workers. We cannot use the intelligence as an excuse to let workers be laid off.” Zhang Shiping, chairman of Weiqiao Venture Group, once admitted to the reporter that new technologies will promote industrial upgrading and we will expand the scale. Absorbing this part of the streamlined workforce will not make a textile worker unemployed.