Project

Industry 4.0

The European industry is challenging the increasing complexity of adopting established production processes to fast changing market demands. The initiative “Industry 4.0” deals with new methods of managing these complexities by using new technologies like distributed and/or decentralized intelligence for controlling and operating new production facilities. This requires self-organizing, self-optimising production and assembly units which are communication among each other to build up a product-specific production setup.

Human-Robot Collaboration

Especially for highly individual products or assembly steps a full automation is often not reachable for both technical and economic reasons. By this means humans and machines have to work cooperatively in future factories. In contrast to common CAD/CAM approaches enable fully automated programming of machines the humans are not programmable automatically. In other words human workers have to be individually trained for each product which result in high ramp up costs for new products and assembly steps.

Project Goals

Therefore, the main goal of the Human Centered Workplace 4 Industry project is to reduce this training effort by researching autonomously configurable, digital assistance systems which support the human workers during their daily work. These digital assistance system range from product-specific work instruction shown on a display, augmented reality solutions for training, up to collaborative robots. During the project the requirements arising from human assembly processes shall be gathered and transformed into a generic setup for a so called “human centered workplace”.

At the workplace, various assistance systems may be applied and evaluated together with the industry partners of the project. Based on the results a data model shall be created containing a mapping of assembly steps and suitability factors of certain assistance systems. Later during the project a software system is developed, which autonomously chooses the right assistance system for each assembly and production step on the basis of product data and a human capability model.

As a final result the project shall give recommendations for standardized HCW4i workplaces which are to be integrated into existing production and assembly processes as well as the underlying IT infrastructure. As a future prospective the workplace may also learn from the daily assembly processes and automatically optimize the digital assistance for each human worker.