Autor: Dieter Steiner

Traditional quality control often falls short in high-mix, low-volume production environments due to variability and complexity. This project introduces an advanced workstation to boost industrial productivity and quality, developed with Axiomatic Design to ensure a clear link between customer needs, functional requirements, and design solutions. Combining polarization cameras, high-resolution imaging, adaptive lighting, and deep learning-based computer vision, the system performs high-accuracy inspection on quantity, quality, and compliance. A digital assistance system offers real-time feedback via an intuitive interface. Validation in a controlled environment confirmed both the system’s practical benefits and its scalability.

The trend towards customer-specific mass production poses great challenges for the classic production methods of small and medium-sized companies. The combination of flexible robotic solutions and artificial intelligence approaches is promising to enable production efficiency and fast adaptability in modern production systems. This paper presents such a solution in the form of a realized demonstrator setup composed of a collaborative robot assistant. The robotic system independently interprets the activities of a human employee and supports the employee in his or her activities by imitation.