Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are also used to transport goods or materials in Midea’s factory in Thailand. “The AGVs we use don’t need preset routes. Instead, they can plan, automate and analyse the real environment in real-time [to move around our factory safely],” Midea’s spokesperson Urban Zhao shares with the media at the Huawei Digital and Intelligence Apac Congress in Bangkok on April 29, 2024.
Manufacturing operations tend to be labour-intensive and dangerous but this is changing as manufacturers modernise their factories for them to become more connected, automated and smart. Mordor Intelligence predicts that the connected manufacturing industry in Asia Pacific will be worth US$54 billion in 2025 and more than US$80 billion by 2029.
China’s home appliance company Midea Group is among the manufacturers that have embraced smart factories. In its factory producing air conditioners in Thailand, human workers use 5G-enabled smartphones to remotely start the assembling process, which is run by robotic arms. The robotic arms can reliably and evenly adjust the flow of production materials as necessary, increasing the quality of products while eliminating the need for humans to conduct dangerous jobs.
