IMTS 2024 Conference: A System Solution to Quality Escapes from Manual Manufacturing Processes

Tuesday September 10 3:15 PM CST
IMTS32 Room W193-B

About the presentation
Most manufacturing production floors will continue to use people for the foreseeable future, because human agility, mobility, visual and tactile sense far outperform automated machinery and robots. Unfortunately, people are always a liability when it comes to process and quality control. No matter how a company modifies its procedures and training, limiting factors inherent to the human condition continue to induce costly quality escapes. Distraction, fatigue, or expectation bias may cause operators to be less vigilant, for example, in checking that they have selected the correct component from a kit for the next step in a manual process. With today’s intensifying schedule and cost pressures, operators may also be more likely to take shortcuts, such as prestamping or stamping behind a whole series of procedural buyoffs. The resulting quality escapes can and have resulted in product failures in the field, including some that have led to loss of life.

Rather than seeking new ways to change human behavior, this paper presents a system solution to quality control comprised of (1) electronic process control and (2) AI-enabled automatic inspection. Electronic process control guides operators to perform the right task at the right time. It includes electronic buyoffs that preclude prestamping or stamping behind. Automatic inspection replaces error-prone manual inspection with machine vision image capture and analysis that achieve near-100% inspection accuracy. The paper will describe this digital approach to quality control, the supporting technology, and a use case in which a manufacturer transitioned from traditional manual control to the proposed digital quality control.

Meet your presenter
As president and founder of Aligned Vision, Scott Blake has pioneered manufacturing digitalization efforts, including 3D industrial laser projection, automatic inspection for composites, and the use of artificial intelligence to accelerate application development. He holds three patents in the area of automatic inspection, and his Composites Manufacturing Process Control System, forerunner of Aligned Vision’s BUILDGUIDE process control system, garnered him the 2000 National Tibbetts award for SBIR work. Blake is currently leading his team to integrate inspection and laser projection into the digital thread for a broad spectrum of manufacturing applications.