Abstract
Despite recent industrial automation advances, small series production still requires a considerable amount of manual work, and training, and monitoring of workers is consuming a significant amount of time and manpower. Adopting live monitoring of the stages in manual production, along with the comprehensive representation of production steps, may help resolve this problem. For ergonomic live support, the overall system presented in this paper combines localization, torque control, and a rotation counter in a novel approach to monitor of semi-automated manufacturing processes. A major challenge in this context is tracking, especially hand-guided tools, without the disruptions and restrictions necessary with rigid position encoders. In this paper, a promising measurement concept involving wireless wave-based sensors for close-range position tracking in industrial surroundings is proposed. By using simple beacons, the major share of processing is transferred to fixed nodes, allowing for reduced hardware size and power consumption for the wireless mobile units. This requires designated localization approaches relying on only relative phase information, similar to the proposed Kalman-filter-based-beam-tracking approach. Measurement results show a beam-tracking accuracy of about 0.58 in azimuth and 0.89 in elevation, resulting in an overall tracking accuracy of about 3.18 cm.
Highlights
The increasing demand for individualization and variant richness creates new challenges for the automation of industrial production
Privacy concerns can lead workers to oppose camera-based sensor networks. Another approach are ultrasound localization systems, which are often used for indoor close-range applications [17,18], but are affected by ultrasonic noise created by machines or handling processes
User interactions are received via a graphical user interface (GUI) accessible via touchscreen
Summary
The increasing demand for individualization and variant richness creates new challenges for the automation of industrial production. A potential solution are visual sensor systems, which were demonstrated in spacious working areas in [14] These systems come along with only one node [15] but are more robust and provide better coverage by employing multiple sensors [16]. Privacy concerns can lead workers to oppose camera-based sensor networks Another approach are ultrasound localization systems, which are often used for indoor close-range applications [17,18], but are affected by ultrasonic noise created by machines or handling processes. Microwave localization systems promise robustness against noise sources common in industrial environments The capabilities of such microwave-based system in industrial applications have already been demonstrated in large-space scenarios, such as material flow monitoring or vehicle and tool tracking in factory buildings [21,22]. This approach could result in track loss and requires a sufficient measurement rate
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