Smart Nut Dispenser for Customized Production in Industry 4.0

Abstract

Traditional production and manufacturing systems are based on mass or batch production where products have the same characteristics for all customers. Given the changes in technology trends and customer requirements, personalized production arises, in which the customer is a source of information for the intelligent manufacturing line. In the present work, an intelligent dispenser of mixed nuts is designed in which customers can place the order by selecting the quantity in grams of four types of nuts. The system implements an architecture of Internet of the Things (IoT) composed of three layers: devices, processing, and cloud services. The device layer uses sensors, actuators, and mechanisms in the dispensing system. The processing layer is done by fog computing with the Arduino Mega and ESP8266 electronic cards. In the cloud services layer, the Web interfaces for clients and administrators were developed, these interact permanently with a MySQL database. In the tests, the maximum data update delay time was 1.3 seconds, the average arrival time of a new order was 1.7 seconds, and an average error was 0.8 grams in dispensing. The smart dispenser has features that integrate it with the technologies used in Industry 4.0, such as: flexibility when preparing the product, connectivity, constant interaction with users, and real-time system status updates.