For production operations, quality assurance over the process chain is indispensible: it is the only way to detect problems at an early stage and lower additional costs. Fraunhofer researchers developed an efficient type of quality control: With a pointing gesture, employees can input any detected defects to car body parts into the inspection system, and document them there.
The non-contact gesture-detection process will be on display in Hall 2, Booth D18 at the 2013 Hannover Messe. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB in Karlsruhe engineered the intelligent gesture control system on behalf of the BMW Group. In the future, it should supersede today's time-consuming test procedures.
"Previously, the inspector had to note all defects that were detected, leave his workstation, go to the PC terminal, operate multiple input screens and then label the position of the defect and the defect type. That approach is laborious, time-intensive and prone to error", asserts Alexander Schick, scientist at IOSB. The gesture control system, by contrast, improves the inspector's working conditions considerably, and triggering substantial time savings - the employee can remain at his workstation and interact directly with the test object. "If the bumper is fine, then he swipes over it from left to right. In the event of damage, he points to the location of the defect", says Schick.
