The Role of Machine Vision in Industry 4.0: an automotive manufacturing perspective
Fotios K. Konstantinidis, Spyridon G. Mouroutsos, Αντώνιος Γαστεράτος
Abstract
The challenging market of automotive industry urges the manufacturers worldwide to benefit from the incredible technological advancements of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), which is in progress. This revolutionary era flourishes the sensing, processing and integration technologies across the systems, while the machine vision serves as the “eyes” of the cyber-physical systems. This paper systematically provides a comprehensive analysis of the applied machine vision systems in the automotive industry over the last five years and anticipates the technology opportunities and future trends. The conducted analysis reveals that the machine vision technology is mainly employed for quality related purposes. Besides, fruitful advancements have occurred in the other automotive manufacturing domains, yet the horizontal and vertical integration is not a priority in their design. The authors conclude that computer vision systems empowered with self-adjustment capacities should be integrated with existing execution systems to rectify defects in real-time, thus promoting the intelligent system design towards enabling the zero defect manufacturing in human and system level.