LIGHT-SWIFT is a France Japan research project on Edge-AI for industry 4.0. Funded by both ANR and JST, the project relies on a well balanced consortium composed of two major laboratories in Computer Science (namely IRISA for France and NII for Japan), a worldwide known telecommunications company (NTT, Japan), and an emerging SME on Sound analysis for predictive maintenance in industry (Wavely, France).

Objectives

Artificial intelligence (AI) brings without any doubt huge opportunities to optimize efficiency of every industrial application and is a key point of Industry 4.0. The deployment of various sensors in factories, also called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) can either help workers in charge of machine maintenance by detecting abnormal behaviours, thus preventing machine breakdown, or help to localize objects or persons in such complex environments. AI algorithms probably represent the best solution to cope with the huge amount of data provided by sensors, but their complexity is also a severe drawback and the processing is mainly centralized.
Energy is crucial for IIoT, since the more sensors are deployed, the more difficult it becomes to ensure sufficient energy, as batteries would need to be recharged more frequently. Moving the processing closest as possible to the sensors would avoid energy hungry transmissions of data. Most of the latter is indeed useless, since AI algorithms need to be fed with descriptors more than raw data. To further enhance energy efficiency of Edge AI, LIGHT-SWIFT aims at proposing a new methodology to reduce the complexity of AI algorithms, paving the way for sustainable smart sensors in Industry 4.0.