What are the challenges?
What will be the features of the automation of tomorrow? How will it be different from today? In other words, what should we, as automation engineers, work on today?
Improving functional capability
When we look down the path ahead, we can quickly see that improving the functional capabilities of automation is a challenge. This challenge mainly resides in the capabilities of sensors and actuators. If we want to think of topics such as pervasive computing, we need to have sensors that are much smaller and that have lower demands on power. In fact, we should have sensors that draw their power from the object that is being monitored. But still, in today’s view, the functional capabilities of sensors or actuators are not the biggest issue.
Improving interaction
No matter how advanced it is, automation needs to have an interface with humans. We saw in Chapter 7, The Interplay of Humans-Machines-Automation, that automation needs human intervention...
