Factories of the future are pulling data from a variety of sources, including sensors and vision systems. However, the inexpensive photoelectric sensors or force transducers that engineers might have deployed in their assembly systems 10 years ago are not necessarily going to work with the industrial internet of things (IIoT).
Conventional sensors are basically analog devices. They convert a physical element, such as stress, force or temperature, into an electrical signal. They don’t have built-in intelligence.