With 5G, AI at the edge promises a compute-everywhere future

Luxury auto maker Audi is driving full-throttle toward Industry 4.0, using AI inference and computer vision on the factory floor with autonomous robot welders that can react in real time and fix issues that may arise when welding the frame of a car. That's just one example of how the company is moving toward realizing its ultimate vision of creating smart factories with a scalable and flexible platform that will enable data analytics, communications and processing at the edge, powered by 5G. In the past, welding required a lot of manual intervention and inspection to ensure sufficient quality, says Nick McKeown, senior vice president and general manager of the network and edge group at Intel, which is working with Audi. Now, with cameras reviewing the quality of the weld the need for human intervention has greatly decreased. "Edge computing is taking the technology resources we've been developing over many years for the computing industry and using them to analyze and process data at the edge", McKeown says.