Machine Vision to Empower an Intelligent Personal Assistant for Assembly Tasks

In the context of the fourth industrial revolution, the integration of human operators in emergent cyber-physical systems assumes a crucial relevance. In this context, humans and machines can not be considered in an isolated manner but instead regarded as a collaborative and symbiotic team. Methodologies based on the use of intelligent assistants that guide human operators during the execution of their operations, taking advantage of user friendly interfaces, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) technologies, become an interesting approach to industrial systems. This is particularly helpful in the execution of customised and/or complex assembly and maintenance operations. This paper presents the development of an intelligent personal assistant that empowers operators to perform faster and more cost-effectively their assembly operations. The developed approach considers ICT technologies, and particularly machine vision and image processing, to guide operators during the execution of their tasks, and particularly to verify the correctness of performed operations, contributing to increase productivity and efficiency, mainly in the assembly of complex products.