In European plants, a large number of employees are still working with their own hands. Individualized products require flexible production systems, and the most flexible resources are the workers. Based on their knowledge and experience, they can customize and build complex products like trucks, buses or machines. Unfortunately, in most cases, their workplaces are not connected based on IoT technologies. Different sensors for capturing tools or parts are available on the market, but there is no plug & play solution to integrate them into an interconnected environment easily.
The goal of ArtWork is to develop a real-time, context-aware assistance system for workers. The solution will be a combination of hardware and software that will be demonstrated in four different industrial use cases in the domain of truck assembly, textile manufacturing, ship engine manufacturing, and bus assembly.
Vision of the Future (Volvo)
In the vision of the factory of the future, smart and connected workers, together with flexible automation, assemble individualized products on the same line. The worker is the most important asset in this vision. ArtWork will develop technologies to empower and support the workers to make this vision possible.
The three main topics of ArtWork are:
- Digital Twins of the factory worker and station equipment: Accurate models represent not only the geometric information, but as well kinematic characteristics. Behavior models of them can react to events and will allow to better plan the manual assembly production cells and connect a digital twin to its real counterpart.
- Smart Instruction generation: Adequate, context-sensitive visualization of worker instructions is one of the challenges in the factory environment. Worker instructions will be derived using an automatic reasoning engine and a set of ground knowledge about processes, tools, and task sequences that cannot be directly reasoned from product structure and geometry. Screens and augmented reality solutions will provide this information to the worker.
- Worker feedback System: Product model combined with production processes models will be linked with the real-time measurement data provided by sensors. Part and tool identification and tracking in a work cell will be possible This will allow automatic derivation of process instructions for workers adapted to the current context. Finally, user input based on natural speech recognition and gesture recognition will be implemented to provide user-friendly user interface.
The ArtWork results will enable workers to be connected to the production line. Depending on the current context, instructions are created in a dynamic way. This innovation of the ArtWork solution can be compared to move from a paper-based map to a dynamic context-sensitive navigation system. Through the strong consortium, which covers the whole value chain from cutting-edge research institutes and universities, technology experts and tool providers, and industrial end users, an industry-driven approach is assured. The consortium is well balanced with respect to SMEs, large companies and research institutions. Use-cases from different domains, which are highly relevant to European Industry will make sure that the developed solutions relate strongly to practitioner’s needs and are widely applicable. The use of and contribution to standards will furthermore allow widespread deployment of the technologies and tools.