ABB claims to have connected 7,000 of its industrial robots to its industrial internet of things platform, which the company calls “Ability”.
ABB Ability was launched only last year, but has grown quickly because of the vast number of machines and devices the industrial giant already has in operation out in the world.
The company appears to consider the industrial internet a central part of its business and has been developing a variety of services for application on it.
The company says the 7,000 industrial robots which are connected to ABB Ability are located at “more than 750 customer sites in 40 countries”.
Furthermore, ABB says more than 40,000 of its robots have been delivered with embedded connectivity, all of which could obviously be connected to Ability.
The figures emerged as part of a customer case study ABB published about gear transmission company Koki, which has connected all 60 of its robots to the ABB Ability platform.
Other, similar industrial internet platforms are available, and Robotics and Automation News has produced lists before.
However, statistics about how many machines are connected to them and how many gigabytes or terabytes of data they collect, and so on, are difficult to find – it’s not something the companies probably prioritize making public, although there doesn’t seem to be much reason to be totally secretive about general, anonymized statistics.
An executive from Siemens did once mention that the company’s MindSphere platform had about 30 million “devices” connected to it by last year.
The “devices” could be as small as a sensor system or an internet hub.
General Electric also has an IIoT platform called Predix, as part of its GE Digital assets portfolio. GE has been in the headlines recently because it appears to be selling its digital assets, which may include Predix, and has already appointed an investment bank to manage the sale, according to the Wall Street Journal.
GE’s Predix was last year said to have an “ecosystem of 200+ industrial apps, 33,000+ developers, 960+ partners, and over 300,000 assets under management”, according to an article on Industrial-IoT.com, which was quoting GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh.
