Lenze Ltd – How much artificial intelligence is integrated in machines nowadays?
29 May 2024
Since ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has been unmissable from the media. But what does it actually look like in the industry? To what extent is it already being applied there to make smarter machines? Here, Dr Johannes Kühn, Head of Control Engineering, Motion Control and Robotics at Lenze, explains where we are today.
“In production itself, in the heart of the machines, there is no artificial intelligence integrated yet,” Kühn immediately tempers expectations. “That doesn’t surprise me so much yet. Reliability and continuity are the keywords there, there is no room for experimentation because in themselves, there is not that much real intelligence in the methods we apply in industry today.
“Machine learning, which gets the most application in industry, is one of the weaker methods to apply and has been around since the 1970s. It boils down to pure statistics: classifying data and making decisions based on historical data.
“The reason it is coming to the surface more now is that there is enough computing power to make those predictions, but you can train a model so well that if a completely new situation then arises, it won’t have an appropriate response in-house. A machine builder cannot afford that. That’s also, for example, where the self-driving car encounters its limits.”
Read the full article in DPA’s June 2024 issue
