Johnson Electric and Cortica Establish Joint Venture to Innovate Quality Inspection with Lean AI

Johnson Electric and Cortica Establish Lean AI Joint Venture to Revolutionize Quality Inspection in Manufacturing

Applying autonomous artificial intelligence to manufacturing, achieving automated quality inspection through simple and quick configuration installed on the production line, creating zero-defect product quality

TEL AVIV, Israel / HONG KONG - Media OutReach - November 11, 2021 - Johnson Electric Group and Cortica Group have formed a joint venture to build autonomous inspection systems and revolutionize the quality inspection market. Lean AI is a disruptive thinking startup that will leverage Johnson Electric’s extensive knowledge and experience in manufacturing and Cortica’s unique autonomous artificial intelligence technology to revolutionize the visual inspection market.

Currently, supervised quality inspection systems based on deep machine learning often take weeks or even months to debug before they can be applied to actual production. Existing systems rely on data scientists or AI experts and require a large number of manually labeled images of product quality defects as training elements for the machine. The system requires constant maintenance and repeated training to cope with slight changes in production, and cannot automatically adjust to new products, new defects, and peripheral hardware updates.

Lean AI's innovative technology overcomes the shortcomings of existing supervised quality inspection systems. Its unsupervised learning ability can process image information in a very short time, using unlabeled raw data, predictive algorithms and compiled data, greatly improving the deployment speed and scale of product inspection production lines. As an open platform independent of surrounding hardware, products and their defects, Lean AI can work with all system integrators, OEMs and automation solution manufacturers.

"With the powerful capabilities of Cortica's proprietary AI technology and Dechang's extensive market insights, Lean AI will be able to provide AI products for manufacturing quality inspection, helping to reduce the risk of human error and address the pain points in the current quality inspection market," said Karina Odinaev, CEO of Lean AI.

"Johnson Electric is pleased to announce this joint venture with Cortica. We fully understand the challenges of using AI quality inspection software in a production environment, especially in terms of speed of deployment and long-term reliability," said Haoran Wang, Senior Vice President of Johnson Electric. "Cortica's autonomous AI technology can solve many of these issues and enable faster and more widespread adoption."

"Cortica has developed self-learning AI algorithms that are fundamentally different from traditional deep learning systems. Self-learning AI technology works like the human brain - it is not a fixed system; instead, it continuously adapts to various scenarios and learns and improves itself online in real time," said Igal Raichelgauz, Founder and Chairman of Cortica. "It requires far less computing power than traditional machines, can be deployed at a fraction of the cost, and delivers superior results. Our technology is powerful and versatile, applicable to a variety of signal domains such as vision, audio, time series, and other fields; visual inspection is just the beginning. Self-learning AI technology is quickly becoming the industry standard."

The current global machine vision market size is $11 billion and is expected to increase to $15.5 billion by 2026. As the market size continues to grow and artificial intelligence technology continues to advance, machine vision solutions will fundamentally revolutionize the quality inspection methods of the manufacturing industry, reduce losses caused by product defects, and ultimately increase manufacturing profits.

Further commenting on the establishment of Lean AI, Wang Haoran said, "Johnson Electric's extensive experience in manufacturing provides a unique platform for the commercialization of this technology. Lean AI also opens up a new way for Johnson Electric to develop and market software products. Therefore, this is both a technological innovation and a business model innovation for us. There will also be opportunities to apply this technology to quality prediction and professional software systems in the future. This is Johnson Electric's second technology investment in Israel, and we will continue to evaluate such related investment opportunities."

About Johnson Electric Group

Johnson Electric Group is a leading international manufacturer of motors, actuators, drive subsystems and related electromechanical components. The Group serves many industries, including automotive products, smart meters, medical devices, business equipment, home automation, ventilation equipment, home appliances, power tools and lawn and gardening equipment. The Group is headquartered in Hong Kong and employs more than 35,000 people in 22 countries around the world. Johnson Electric Holdings Limited is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Limited (stock code: 179).

About Cortica Group

The Cortica Group develops autonomous AI that mimics the natural processes of the mammalian cortex. Its unsupervised learning approach mimics the way the brain processes information: enabling machines to autonomously learn, collaborate and interact with the world without human intervention. Backed by more than 250 patents and patent applications and 10 years of cutting-edge research, this technology is revolutionizing the field of visual intelligence for a smarter and safer world.