Vision System Experimentation in Furniture Industrial Environment

Abstract

The integration of devices that support manufacturing activities and the interaction of workers with these devices in production plants, leads to potential benefits in the industrial environment. Problems, bottlenecks and improvement opportunities throughout production times need to be detected, analyzed and prioritized in order to select the most suitable solutions and address them properly. The integration of particular devices supports the manufacturing process and prevents the need for contingency planning; it also increases the quality of the produced goods, which leads to higher customer confidence and satisfaction. The scope of this article focuses on the development and experimentation of a vision system for the recognition of product components in order to support the classification of such items by the users working in a particular area of the production line. Even if the proposed solution presents a low level of human interaction and innovation, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the proposed classification system brings valuable benefits to the overall manufacturing process in a traditional furniture environment, with the inherent advantage that workers can perform this task in a more guided and riskless manner. The Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) approach was adopted to measure the benefits of the solution, which are described in article.

Industry 4.0 as an Opportunity and Challenge for the Furniture Industry—A Case Study

“…The most important obstacles to the application of Industry 4.0 are low series, atypical production and constant adaptation to the parameters and properties of the processed material [56]. Stakeholders also agree on these specifics in the furniture industry and point to the applicability of the Industry 4.0 concept in particular for plants processing homogeneous material with a high repetition rate rather than for enterprises producing highly atypical production or combining the processing of a massive raw material in the form of lumber with board material.…”