Toyota to use AI in new city build
Toyota, one of the biggest automobile manufacturer, Toyota, is employing artificial intelligence to make a futuristic city for 2,000 staff members and families. The city will be powered by robots as well and will be governed by an operating system with roads dedicated for self-driving vehicles. The company has begun laying the foundation for a 175-acre smart city in Japan and says that artificial intelligence and futuristic technologies will act as a ‘living laboratory’ which raises many eyebrows. Being built at the base of Mount Fuji, the “Woven City” will be situated approximately 62 miles from Tokyo. The aim of building such a city is to serve as a testing ground for modern technology that can be established across other urban environments like robotics, AI, and interconnected smart homes.
Fertilizer firm tracks worker safety
Today, companies are leveraging radio frequency identification (RFID) or Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to ensure worker safety by tracking each individual’s proximity or location. The challenge is multifold, though, for some businesses at which hundreds or thousands of contract workers periodically surge onto a worksite for days or weeks at a time, then leave. Global fertilizer company Nutrien faces such a challenge, with periodic scheduled breaks in production for maintenance services known as turnarounds. At one nitrogen site, for instance, the company employs a few hundred workers, but the turnaround can bring 1,500 more. All of the contractors are there only for a short time, yet they face the same health challenges as other workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, permanent employees already striving to track social contacts are now surrounded by a large number of temporary workers.
HID acquires Invengo’s RFID textile services
An acquisition brings Invengo’s tags, readers and software to HID’s expanding RFID portfolio, enabling healthcare and hospitality companies to better manage the flow of linens and uniforms as they are used, cleaned and repaired. HID Global has acquired the Invengo Textile Services division from Invengo Information Technology, bringing RFID-enabled linen and laundry management into its expanding portfolio of radio frequency identification products. The acquisition is aimed at extending HID’s family of products to meet what it views as an escalating demand for textile-based RFID. The technology offers loss-prevention capabilities, high-value analytics and real-time inventory visibility to increase efficiency in commercial laundry management.
IoT earthquake sensors bring building intelligence
Safehub has released the latest version of its Yure structural-integrity solution, with the goal of making it affordable for nearly every building within a given zone to track conditions both during and after quakes. The company says it has a vision for its latest sensor-based system, named for the Japanese term for ‘tremor’, and the software platform in which sensor data is managed and shared. The company seeks to make the technology affordable for buildings in potential earthquake zones so that seismic activity and damage can be monitored, no matter where a building owner or manager is located. Yure is the company’s third iteration of an IoT solution and the second to use cellular connectivity, so that building owners can track the conditions of their structures and any potential damage involving seismic events. Sensors, attached to a wall and plugged directly into a building’s outlets, forward data to a server via cellular connectivity. Users then receive alerts and can view historical data using the software-as-a-service.
RFID to reinforce dike safety
Construction consortium Levvel is manufacturing 100 blocks a day for reinforcement of the Netherlands’ Afsluitdijk dam and causeway, and is tracking the blocks from curing to installation via an Aucxis RFID solution that includes embedded tags, as well as readers installed on cranes. A 20-mile dike-reinforcement project in North Holland is leveraging UHF RFID technology to manage each of 75,000 blocks as they are manufactured, stored and then installed to future-proof a 90-year-old retainment structure. The Dutch government’s Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat) project, led by the Levvel Consortium, is scheduled for completion in 2022. The RFID-enabled blocks now being installed in the dam are using RFID technology provided by Aucxis RFID Solutions. The renovation of the Afsluitdijk (“Enclosure Dam” in English) includes a new layer of blocks along 20 miles of the dike’s length, while management of the operations and long-term maintenance of those blocks is being accomplished by uniquely identifying each one digitally, from the point of manufacture until the blocks’ installation. The solution consists of Aucxis’s ATLAS Track & Trace technology to monitor each block constructed for the dike, as well as RFID readers supplied by Impinj, which are deployed at the manufacturing location, in the concrete block-drying area and on cranes that lower the blocks into place at the dam site.