AI-Based Cyber-Physical “Assembly+” Workstation

Abstract

Considering the rising labor cost and the shortage of skilled workers, as the goal of “Industry 4.0”, the unmanned factory using intelligent technologies is the future of manufacturing. However, this ideal picture is still hard to achieve, not only the most manufacturing processes are too complex to become completely automatic with existing technologies, but also an excessive automation will cause an imbalance in investment return and efficiency. Moreover, in practice, robots can just be simply used in flow shop, and only less than 50% of the assembly processes which are the core work of a manufacturer can be replaced by robots. According to this, in the long term, human will still play an important role in manufacturing process especially in assembly process. Therefore, with the rapid development of Internet and intelligent technologies, how to improve the quality and efficiency of a human-machine system is widely concerned in academia and industry.

As the core work in manufacturing, assembly is a complex process that involves human, machine, materials, information and so on. Those factors can be added to an open intelligent assembly system with advanced technologies especially AI, which named “Assembly+”. This research aims to establish this assembly system and design a novel human-oriented intelligent workstation based on it. With this framework, in the future, a digital model of this workstation can be set up though a cyber-physical system. In this seminar, the outline of this assembly system and workstation will be illustrated and discussed.