The evolving business climate in 2022 resulting from the continued pandemic, as well as spinoff issues such as supply chain, labor, and inflationary challenges, is forcing many businesses and manufacturing executives to implement automation and robotics technologies for their production, distribution and fulfillment facilities.Â
The ongoing economic challenges, and continued pressure from business investors for a strong focus on the bottom line, has added pressure to companies that need to become even more efficient with their factory operations and product development teams.Â
Sure, many manufacturing facilities continue to rely heavily on human labor. However, increasing locations are now implementing automation and robotics technologies powered by Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) to speed efficiencies, lower costs, and minimize human touch points to ease the pain from staffing challenges.
Larger Investments in Automation
Demand for workplace robots in the U.S. rose by a record 40%Opens a new window during the first quarter compared with the same period in 2021, according to the Association for Advancing Automation, which tracks trends in the robotics industry.
Automotive sector widely uses automation-driven robotics such as assembly line production. But now, other industries like aerospace, retail, food production, construction equipment, and pharmaceuticals are seeing gains in using these machines on the plant floor.
The business benefits of increased productivity and reduced costs are a boon to the bottom line. However, other leading drivers show that these technologies are helping to enhance new social distancing policies enacted during the early days of the pandemic.
Increased Flexibility Across Manufacturing Facilities
The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated the need for more operational flexibility where advanced technology and automation can be applicable. In addition, the ability to scale up or down quickly to meet project deadlines without impacting hourly shifts has further helped with manufacturing efficiency.
Technologies such as AR/VR-driven robotics and automation have also significantly increased across plant floors, especially as the need to adhere to tighter supply chain and logistics demands has been paramount this summer.
See More: How Edge and 5G Can Unlock the True Potential of AR and VR
Doing More With Less
As we move through 2022, continued disruptions to the global supply chain are becoming more of the new normal, and manufacturers continue to address the cascading events differently. For example, improving supply-chain visibility and increasing customer satisfaction is important. 59%Opens a new window said improving supply-chain visibility was their single most important business priority in 2022, while 45% chose improving customer satisfaction. Better automation-driven technologies are paving the way for these improvements.
Cloud-Based Automation Technologies Proving Pivotal
AR/VR is necessary today in automation and robotics technologies, but there are important areas to understand when leveraging such technology for manufacturing applications. The technology allows designers and manufacturers to conduct real-time 3D visualization and CAD for design and manufacturing; faster training cycles; professionals can work at drastically higher levels. Some manufacturers report minimized errors using AR/VR through instructions overlay, remote assistance, and better planning and visualization. This has resulted in a more than 40 percent increase in productivity in some instances. AR/VR technologies provide significant time savings to the manufacturing build process through an optimized decision process, which positively impacts the entire OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act).
The Need for 3D & AI in Immersive Mixed Reality
One of the key requirements for mixed reality applications is to precisely overlay on an object its model or the digital twin. his provides assembly and training work instructions and helps track manufacturing errors and defects. The user can also track the object(s) and adjust the rendering as the work progresses.Â
Most on-device object tracking systems use 2D image and marker-based tracking, severely limiting the accuracy of overlays in 3D because 2D tracking cannot estimate the depth and, as a result, cannot estimate the scale and pose with high accuracy. It means that even though users can get what looks like a good match when looking from one angle and position, the overlay loses alignment as the user moves around in 6DOF. Also, the object detection, identification, and its scale and orientation estimation — called object registration — is achieved, in most cases, computationally or using simple computer vision methods with standard training libraries (examples: Google MediaPipe, VisionLib) and this works well for regular and/or smaller and simpler objects such as hands, faces, cups, tables, chairs, wheels, regular geometry structures, etc. However, labeled training data (more so in 3D) is not readily available for large, complex objects in enterprise use cases, and that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to use the 2D image-based tracking to align, overlay, and persistently track the object and fuse the rendered model with it in 3D.
The Right Platform Technology To Enable Automation
One caveat facility managers must consider is that not all automation technologies are created equal. It is important to pay close attention to the technology infrastructure and choose a cloud-enabled platform so that projects can truly scale when needed. Manufacturers are overcoming their growth limitations by leveraging cloud-based (or remote server-based) AR/VR platforms powered by distributed cloud architecture and 3D vision-based AI. These cloud platforms provide the desired performance and scalability to drive innovation in the industry at speed and scale.
Using robotics and AR/VR-driven automation technologies requires the right speed and data for accuracy. Even though technologies like AR/VR have been in use for several years, many manufacturers have deployed virtual solutions built upon an on-premise environment, where all the data is stored locally.Â
On-premise AR/VR infrastructures limit the speed and scalability needed for today’s virtual designs.It limits the ability to conduct knowledge sharing between organizations that can be critical when designing new products and understanding the best way for virtual buildouts.
Manufacturers today are overcoming these limitations by leveraging cloud-based (or remote server-based) AR/VR platforms powered by distributed cloud architecture and 3D vision-based AI. These cloud platforms provide the desired performance and scalability to drive innovation in the industry at speed and scale.
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