Individual Assembly Guidance

In this chapter, an approach to assisting manual assembly processes individually is presented. The objective is to reduce process times by giving individual instructions to the assemblers. In manual assembly, worker assistance systems are used for worker guidance and the simultaneous quality assurance of the assembly steps in real time. The assistance system guides the workers step by step through the assembly process and simultaneously ensures that no errors occur. In practice, it has been shown that the use of assistance systems increases the quality of the assembly process but also increases process times. The approach shown in this chapter overcomes this loss in efficiency by assisting workers individually. The assistance system learns from the process executions of the employees through the digital twins of the employees. The assistance system adapts to the behaviour of the employees and highlights process steps in which mistakes might occur. Thereby, the number of interactions with the assistance system is reduced and more specific assistance is given.