Challenges and Opportunities for Iot- Enabled Cybermanufacturing: Some Initial Findings from an Iot-enabled Manufacturing Technology Testbed

Internet of Things (IoT) have gained tremendous momentum and importance in recent years. Initiated from services and consumer products industries, there is a growing interest in using IoT technologies in various industries. In manufacturing, advanced or smart manufacturing and cybermanufacturing are also drawing increasing attention. Because IoT devices such as IoT sensors are usually much cheaper and smaller than the traditional sensors, there is a potential for instrumenting manufacturing systems with massive number of sensors, then big data subsequently collected from IoT sensors can be utilized to advance manufacturing. This type of IoT applications has not drawn much attention from either academic researchers or industrial practitioners. One possible reason is that the benefits of such applications have not been recognized or tested. Therefore, we built an IoT-enabled manufacturing technology testbed (MTT) to explore the potential of IoT sensors. In this work, the characteristics of a type of IoT temperature sensor were studied and mathematical models were developed to capture these characteristics and to accurately reproduce the observed behaviors. Based on the initial findings from our MTT experiments, challenges and opportunities for IoT-enabled manufacturing are discussed.