Industry 4.0 and the digital manufacturing revolution are all about collecting—and, more importantly, acting on—data gathered from the assembly process in real time. That’s all well and good when data is coming from sensors, vision systems, fastening tools and other electronic devices. But, how can engineers gather real-time data on largely manual assembly processes, such as wire harness assembly?
To solve this problem, we developed a software- and sensor-based system to measure activity times and performance on a wire harness assembly line. To ensure a real-time connection between assembler performance and varying product complexity, our system relies on fixture sensors and an indoor positioning system (IPS). Our goal was to create a system that could continuously estimate the time consumed by the various elementary activities that make up wire harness assembly. Our system creates a model of a task, compares estimated activity times to the actual performance of assemblers, and generates early warnings when their productivity decreases.