"Made in China 2025" has been released for nearly a year, and the conceptual level can be described as brilliant, from Industry 4.0, industrial informatization to intelligent manufacturing, unmanned factories, and now it extends to unmanned vehicles, unmanned ships, and unmanned medical equipment. It seems that the era of industrial intelligence and unmanned automation is just around the corner.

Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei Technology, made an objective judgment on this. He believes that this is the era of artificial intelligence, and industrial automation must be emphasized first; after industrial automation, it is possible to enter into informatization; only after informatization can it be intelligent. China's industry has not yet fully automated, and there are still many industries that cannot even be semi-automated.

Therefore, before exploring Industry 4.0 and unmanned industry, it is necessary to understand the historical origin, technical origin and economic significance of related concepts.

In the 1980s, the U.S. auto industry feared being overwhelmed by Japanese competitors. In Detroit, many looked ahead to "lights-out production" to beat rivals. "Lights-out production" means that the factory is highly automated, the lights are off, and the robots are building cars by themselves. At that time, this kind of thinking was unrealistic. The competitive advantage of Japanese car companies did not lie in automated production, but in "lean production" technology, and lean production relied on manpower in most cases.

Today, advances in automation technology have gradually made "lights-out production" a reality. Japanese robot maker FANUC has been able to leave some of its production lines unattended, running autonomously for weeks.

German Volkswagen aims to dominate the world, the automotive industry group has formulated a new production strategy: modular transverse moment. Volkswagen wants to use this new process to produce all models on the same production line. This process will eventually allow VW factories around the world to produce whatever models the local market requires.

Many years ago, Qian Xuesen once said: "As long as the automatic control is done well, even if the components are poor, the missile can hit the sky."

Today, automation will imitate human intelligence to a large extent. Robots have been applied in fields such as industrial production, ocean development, and space exploration. Expert systems have achieved remarkable results in medical diagnosis and geological exploration. Factory automation, office automation, home automation and agricultural automation will become an important part of the new technology revolution and will develop rapidly.

On the whole, there is still a big gap between China's traditional industries and industrial powers in terms of technical equipment, energy and raw material consumption, product quality and management level, especially the gap in technical equipment (such as high-end CNC machine tools) is expanding . The country cannot afford large-scale equipment upgrades; the consequences of maintaining the status quo of equipment will be unimaginable. Only by applying automation technology to transform traditional industries can the quality of enterprises be most effectively improved.