OMRON Corporation (HQ: Shimogyo-Ku, Kyoto. CEO: Yoshihito Yamada) will introduce on July 1, 2016, the IO-Link compliant Photoelectric Sensors E3Z, Color Mark Photoelectric Sensors E3S-DC Series, Proximity Sensors E2E and E2EQ Series, and IO-Link Master Units GX and NX Series all at once as a first step of integrating sensors into the IoT (Internet of things), ideal for use at manufacturing sites. This launch of the IO-Link compliant sensors is a big step in making production equipment smarter to add various information and communication functions to over 100,000 of specifications of control components for factory automation (FA devices) and achieve integration of FA and ICT (information and communications technology).
At present, as manufacturing industries accelerate their shifts to high-mix low-volume production and optimally located production on a global scale, there is growing demand for adopting the IoT to production lines and equipment in order to improve operation rates of production equipment and produce high quality products stably. Given such circumstances, in order to visualize not only sensors’ ON/OFF signals but also other information such as light incident levels, OMRON adds IO-Link technology to Photoelectric and Proximity Sensors, for which OMRON has a high market share, used in many areas at manufacturing sites. The new IO-Link compliant Sensors equipped with individual identification functions and OMRON’s unique abnormality detection and condition monitoring functions allow reduction in equipment downtime, a decrease in the frequency of sudden failure, and improvement in changeover efficiency, which are management challenges at manufacturing sites. OMRON contributes to making production equipment smarter by providing the IO-Link compliant devices which enable a host controller such as a PLC to gather various data crucial for stable operation of the equipment through the Master Unit via EtherCAT.
