December 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8IN MY Viewhe cameras are watching. Everywhere. All the time. I'm not referring to the streets and subways of London, Shanghai or New York, though. Rather, this new reality applies to the cameras enabled with machine vision capabilities that are increasingly being placed inside advanced production facilities. They are radically transforming manufacturing processes, while simultaneously boosting productivity, efficiency and quality.Machine vision refers to the process of using an image to extract information, then leveraging the information to confirm presence or absence, check position or orientation and to spot patterns or exceptions resulting from the analysis of multiple sequential images over time. These capabilities are being applied in a variety of ways to revolutionize manufacturing and production processes.For example, machine vision can serve as a basis for automation and collaboration with robots deployed for manufacturing processes. In discrete manufacturing, a machine vision-enabled process can provide a visual inspection of materials, parts, and labels from a given bill-of-materials (BOM) prior to assembly. This ensures the proper location and installation of any given part or material, as well as the capability to detect any potential material defects pre-production. Combined with robotics solutions, these machine vision capabilities can alert robots when to initiate an assembly process or when to remove parts from a process in the event of an issue or defect.As manufacturing processes get closer and closer to consumers, the combination of machine vision and robotics can be applied to increasingly complex and variable make-to-order scenarios that would be impossible in more traditional manufacturing environments relying on economies of scale to be cost effective. Automated artificial intelligence-enabled software `bots' could "learn" millions, if not billions, of potential combinations of products and parts. It's not unreasonable to expect them to apply that knowledge to pick components down to the individual order level, present them to the manufacturing process for visual inspection and then, once confirmed and approved, pass them on to an industrial robot for final assembly. This process would occur in seconds, and with no TIT'S WATCHING WHAT YOU EAT: MACHINE VISION AND THE FUTURE OF CONSUMER PRODUCTS MANUFACTURINGMark OsbornMark Osborn, VP, Strategy & Business Planning, SAP [ETR: SAP]
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