Human-Centered Automation in Manufacturing: Automation that Focuses on Improving Quality of Life
The benefits of automation can go well beyond cost reduction and have the potential to improve quality of life in the following ways:
- Improving Productivity of Manufacturing Workforce: Automation can significantly improve worker productivity and empower them to deliver more value for their efforts. An opportunity to effectively deploy and utilize automation can create new pathways for career advancement for manufacturing workers, steering them towards more rewarding and fulfilling jobs.
- Reducing Health Risks for Manufacturing Workers: Many manufacturing workers have to endure ergonomically challenging work (e.g., sanding or grinding). Working on these tasks often leads to health issues like carpal tunnel syndrome, musculoskeletal injuries, and respiratory problems. Automation reduces health risks for workers and enables them to focus on tasks that add higher value to the product.
- Reducing Environmental Impacts of Manufacturing: The manufacturing industry produces a significant environmental impact in terms of energy consumption, generation of waste that goes to landfill, consumption of natural resources, and emission of harmful pollutants. Automation solutions eliminate errors and consistently perform the process under optimal operating conditions, leading to a reduction in energy consumption, conservation of natural resources, and reduction of waste. The reduced environmental impact of manufacturing benefits everyone in society.
- Improving Standards of Living: Many manual processes are designed based on human capabilities. Automation enables the development of fundamentally new processes that offer new opportunities for innovation. For example, automation enables utilizing phenomena at small size scales and processes can be made much more efficient by using large pressures and temperatures. Many innovations in biomedical devices are realized by recent advances in automation such as 3D printing. An increase in the standard of living will not be possible without innovations in biomedical devices.
- Expanding the Pool of Manufacturing Workers: People with disabilities are known to be loyal employees with very good work ethics. They also exhibit a significant amount of commitment to their jobs. Automation reduces the need for physically demanding work and creates new opportunities for workers with disabilities. The manufacturing sector can expand the pool of available workers by deploying the right kind of automation. This helps the manufacturing sector to cope with a labor shortage and enables people to find rewarding work opportunities.
Automation that is designed and deployed to serve humans and improve their quality of life is called Human-Centered Automation.
How AI is Enabling Human-Centered Automation
Human-centered automation cannot be realized without technologies that are smart enough to augment, enhance, and amplify human capabilities.
We are seeing an emergence of smart technologies that offer highly flexible and adaptive automation solutions. The previous generation of automation solutions required significant efforts from humans during the deployment phase and hence were very difficult to scale. Humans were needed to program the system and conduct extensive testing to ensure that the automation solution being deployed was safe and reliable. This meant traditional automation solutions could be used only in mass-production applications. New-generation smart automation solutions can be used to support highly flexible manufacturing and support a high degree of customization in products. This empowers companies to produce customized products to deliver a much better value to their customers.
Recent advances in AI technologies are driving smart automation solutions. AI enables automated generation of production plans, process monitoring, process optimization, error handling, and equipment maintenance. Large language models are being exploited to automatically generate code. Image recognition methods are being adapted for defect detection and quality monitoring. Pattern recognition and signal processing methods are being used to analyze the health of the processing equipment and recommend maintenance at optimal intervals. Similar methods are being used to autonomously adapt process conditions to ensure safe and efficient production in the presence of variability in upstream processes.
Generative AI techniques enable humans to interact with machines in a much more natural way. AI-based reasoning endows machines with introspection capabilities so that they can seek help from humans on challenging tasks. Augmented reality-based interfaces enable humans to provide the necessary guidance to machines in an intuitive manner.
We are living in the golden era of innovation. New concepts are being proposed to radically transform the energy, space, transportation, and healthcare sectors. Unfortunately, without a dramatic boost in human productivity in the manufacturing sector, these new concepts cannot be exploited to improve the quality of life. Therefore, human-centered automation is a key to harnessing the power of innovations.
The Power of Human-AI-Machine Teams
While automation is essential in manufacturing, it does not eliminate the need for human workers. Humans have always played an important role in manufacturing enterprises, and we expect that they will continue to play an important role in manufacturing. Humans offer unparalleled flexibility to quickly adapt and have creative abilities to handle new challenges. Here are a few key reasons:
- Deployment of Automation Technologies: In the factories of the future, humans will continue to play a pivotal role in decision-making, utilizing their expertise and judgment to deploy, upgrade, and retire technologies.
- Troubleshooting and Problem-solving: When unexpected issues arise in the factories of the future, humans will be needed to troubleshoot and devise creative solutions to address the problems.
- Quality Assurance: The definition of quality control criteria will require human input. Humans will need to play a critical role in monitoring production processes and ensuring that products meet quality standards.
- Delivering Value to Customers: Most industry sectors are facing pressure to manufacture customized products in a cost-effective manner. Designing and producing unique and personalized products requires human involvement. With the help of smart automation, manufacturers can integrate more customization and adapt to small changes in their processes, making it possible to produce tailored products. Human-supervised smart automation can extend this capability to a larger scale.
Humans will continue to play an important role in the next generation of manufacturing as we move from mass-produced products to cost-effective customization. Human workers teamed with AI-powered machines will help us deliver human-centered automation technologies to increase human productivity, reduce health risks for humans, and enable human creativity.
The Importance Of Human-Centered Automation In Manufacturing