Revolutionizing Industrial Automation in Taiwan with NVIDIA Metropolis and NIM

Taiwan's Electronics Giants Propel Industrial Automation with NVIDIA Metropolis and NIM

Taiwan, INTI - Taiwan's electronics industry is experiencing a surge in advancements in automation, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for manufacturing processes. With fleets of robots and millions of cameras and sensors, the smart factories of the future are becoming increasingly efficient.

Dozens of electronics manufacturing and automation specialists, including Foxconn, Pegatron, and Wistron, are showcasing their use of NVIDIA software at COMPUTEX in Taipei. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang highlighted these companies in his keynote address.

These companies are demonstrating the latest innovations in computer vision and generative AI using NVIDIA Metropolis for a range of applications, from automating product manufacturing to enhancing worker safety and device performance.

Creating Autonomous Factories

Facing increasing production challenges, manufacturers see the need to transform factories into autonomous machines, with generative AI and digital twins as their foundation. AI agents, powered by large language models (LLMs), are being developed to interact and assist on warehouse floors, boosting productivity and safety. Digital twins help manufacturers simulate and develop factories and AI-powered automation before deployment in real factories.

Foxconn and its subsidiary Ingrasys use NVIDIA Omniverse and Metropolis to build digital twins for factories, planning efficiency optimizations and worker safety improvements at multiple manufacturing sites. At COMPUTEX, Foxconn demonstrated how it uses digital twins to plan the placement of numerous video cameras in factories to optimize data capture for gaining key insights.

Bringing Generative AI to the Factory Floor

Generative AI is creating productivity leaps across industries. Research by McKinsey forecasts that generative AI will deliver up to $290 billion in value for the advanced manufacturing industry, while contributing $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.

At GTC in March, NVIDIA launched NVIDIA NIM, a set of microservices designed to accelerate the deployment of generative AI in enterprises. Supporting a wide range of AI models, NIM ensures seamless, scalable AI inferencing, both on-premises and in the cloud, using industry-standard application programming interfaces.

Billions of IoT devices worldwide can tap into Metropolis and NVIDIA NIM to improve their AI perception capabilities.

Advancing Manufacturing with NVIDIA NIM

Linker Vision, an AI vision insights specialist, is adopting NVIDIA NIM to help factories deploy AI agents that can respond to natural language queries. The Taipei-based company uses NVIDIA Visual Insight Agent (VIA) in manufacturing environments for continuous video feed monitoring of factory floors. With user prompts, these ChatGPT-like systems enable operators to request video monitoring of factory floors for insights and safety alerts, such as when workers are not wearing hardhats.

Operators can ask questions and receive instant, context-aware responses from AI agents, which can tap into organizational knowledge via retrieval-augmented generation, an AI integration that can enhance operational efficiency.

Leading manufacturer Pegatron, with factories spanning over 20 million square feet and processing more than 15 million assemblies per month, deploys more than 3,500 robots across its factory floors. Pegatron announced efforts based on NVIDIA NIM and uses Metropolis multi-camera tracking reference workflows to improve worker safety and productivity on factory lines. Pegatron's workflow combines digital twins in Omniverse and Metropolis real-time AI to better monitor and optimize operations.

Enhancing Automated Visual Inspections

The adoption of NVIDIA Metropolis helps Taiwan's largest electronics manufacturers streamline operations and reduce costs as they build and inspect some of the world's most complex and high-volume products.

Quality control with manual inspections in manufacturing is a multi-trillion-dollar challenge. While automated optical inspection (AOI) systems have been relied upon for some time, legacy AOI systems have high false detection rates, requiring costly secondary manual inspections for verification.

NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories offers a state-of-the-art AI reference workflow for bringing sophisticated and accurate AOI inspection applications to production faster.

TRI, Taiwan's leading AOI equipment maker, announced it is integrating NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories workflow and capabilities into its latest AOI systems and plans to use NVIDIA NIM to further optimize system performance.

Wistron is expanding its OneAI platform for visual inspection and AOI with Metropolis. OneAI has been deployed in more than 10 Wistron factories globally, spanning hundreds of inspection points.

MediaTek, a leading innovator in connectivity and multimedia and one of Taiwan's largest IoT silicon vendors, announced at COMPUTEX that it is teaming with NVIDIA to integrate NVIDIA TAO training and pretrained models into its AI development workflow for IoT device customers. The collaboration brings Metropolis and the latest advances in AI and visual perception to billions of far-edge IoT devices and streamlines software development for MediaTek's next phase of growth in edge IoT.

Learn about NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories, NVIDIA NIM, and the NVIDIA Metropolis multi-camera tracking workflow, which developers can use to build state-of-the-art real-time locating services and worker safety into their factory or warehouse operations.

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