After a month of containment, the French economy, like its factories, is operating in degraded mode.
Necessary health measures have led to the reduction of on-site staff, a travel ban and the suspension of training, among other things. This is logical, necessary and unavoidable to protect teams, and even more so the entire population.
Some companies have been able to adapt relatively quickly to these new constraints thanks to teleworking, but this option is not always possible, particularly in industry where manual work is a central component of the activity. This is the main reason for the impact of the Covid-19 crisis in Industry.
Nevertheless, the announcement of the start of deconfinement on May 11th gives a little hope to our manufacturers, who therefore have a central objective to achieve: to prepare and ensure a controlled revival of their activity. In other words, it is now necessary to rethink the organization of work in factories to combine the necessary revival with the imperatives of fighting the spread of the virus.
As a player in Industry 4.0, Spectral asks the following question: how manufacturers rely on technological innovation to control their revival?
Industry 4.0 is rich in innovations of all types to improve plants productivity, whether it is automation to make production lines more fluid, IoT (Internet of Things) to better organize the machine park, digital twins, etc...
Parmi ces technologies à vocation industrielle, on trouve la Réalité Augmentée, ou RA, qui permet, via des lunettes connectées, de projeter des informations numériques directement dans le champ de vision de celui ou celle qui les porte. Cette technologie peut être un outil clé pour optimiser la réouverture des usines. Analysons comment.
Augmented Reality is an extremely powerful tool to ensure operator autonomy. Business processes can be digitized and then consulted in Augmented Reality, in order to guide, step by step, the operators in different gestures where additional assistance is needed. Accidents, injuries and errors can thus be reduced, making operators more autonomous and more efficient in their functions. As a result, guidance reduces travel and expert intervention, thus reducing health risks in plants for both experts and operators.
AR enables operators to gain autonomy at all skill levels. In concrete terms, through the digitalization of processes in augmented reality, operators will be able to acquire skills without the need for support at each stage of their training. In this way, it is possible to reduce the travel of trainers and journeymen, but also to ensure that barrier gestures are respected.
All you have to do is equip a pair of connected glasses, go to the foot of the machine, select the process to be consulted, and carry out the operation with all the support provided. The AR even enables to integrate validation steps of the acquired knowledge thanks to questions asked to the operator, thus freeing a consequent time for the trainers.
By definition, manual work cannot be done remotely. However, Augmented Reality enables us to approach a form of "manual telecommuting ». Via the "remote expert" technology, operators can call upon an expert to solve a specific problem, in Augmented Reality. Concretely, the expert will be able to see, on his computer (or tablet, smartphone) exactly what the operator wearing the glasses sees and interact directly with the operator's field of vision using arrows and other numerical shapes to guide the operator in a specific operation. Thanks to this, the expert can guide all the operators accurately despite the distance.
If you would like to know more about Augmented Reality, you can visit our site and contact our experts.