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TOKYO: In a factory south of the city of Toyota in Japan, robots have begun to show the percentage of quality inspectors’ paintings, while the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates the passage of Toyota’s much-ackling “go-and-see” formula that helped revolutionize mass production in the 20th century.
Inside Musashi Seimitsu Industry’s car portion factory, a robot arm selects and rotates a tapered gear, gently sweeping its teeth to detect surface defects. .
“Inspecting 1000 copies of the same thing day in and day out requires a lot of skill and experience, but it’s not very creative,” Chief Executive Hiroshi Otsuka told Reuters. “We’d like to lose staff from those tasks. “
Global brands have long used robots in production, leaving spiny defect detection paints mainly to humans, but social esttachment measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 led to a rethinking of the plant.
This has encouraged increased use of robots and other quality technologies, adding remote tracking that was already followed before the pandemic.
In Japan, these approaches are a radical break with the “genchi genbutsu” methodology, “go and see” evolved as a component of Toyota’s production formula and was followed by Japanese brands for decades with almost zeal.
This procedure requires staff to frequently control all facets of the production chain for irregularities, and has made quality control one of the last human delays in automated plants in a different way.
However, even at Toyota Motor, when asked about automating more “genchi genbutsu” procedures, a spokesman said, “We are still looking for tactics in our production processes, adding automation processes wherever it makes sense. “
QUALITY REQUIREMENTS
Innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) have gone hand in hand with affordable equipment, but also with stricter quality needs in the customer component.
“We are seeing a hole in development between the quality of products manufactured on normal production lines and the quality demanded by our consumers,” Kazutaka Nagaoka, Japan Display’s production director, told Apple and many automakers.
“The quality of products manufactured in automated lines is incredibly superior and more consistent. “
However, automating inspections is a challenge, given the desire to teach robots to identify tens of thousands of imaginable flaws for an express product and apply that learning instantly.
Musashi Seimitsu’s low defect rate of one consistent with 50,000 sets left the company with enough faulty examples to expand an effective AI algorithm.
But one came from Israeli businessman Ran Poliakine, who implemented the artificial intelligence and optical generation he had used in medical diagnostics on the production line.
His concept was to teach the device to detect the good, that the bad, basing the set of rules on up to a hundred very better or almost better sets, an amendment of the so-called gold sample.
“If you look at human tissue, you are training a set of rules about what is smart and what is not, and you only have a moment to make the diagnosis,” he said.
“ABOUT STEROIDS”
Since this advance, the start-up of Poliakine, SixAI and Musashi Seimitsu, have created MusashiAI, a joint venture that develops and rents quality robots, a novelty in the field.
Inquiries from automakers, spare parts suppliers and other corporations in Japan, India, the United States and Europe have quadrupled since March, when the global coronavirus said Poliakine.
“COVID-19 has accelerated movement. It’s all on steroids now, because fleeing house displays, remote paintings can paint,” he said.
Earlier this year, auto parts manufacturer Marelli, which has an operational headquarters in Japan and Italy, also launched AI quality inspection robots at a factory in Japan and told Reuters last month that it sought to make AI play a larger role in long-term quality inspections. . Years.
Printer manufacturer Ricoh plans to automate all the production processes of drum sets and toner cartridges at one of its Japanese plants until March 2023. Robots already perform the most processes and, since April, technicians have been tracking the plant’s appliances from home.
“Of course, it must be available to compare and execute responses when disorders arise, but identity and confirmation are responsibilities that we can now perform at home,” said Kazuhiro Kanno, general manager of Ricoh’s printer production unit.
Musashi Seimitsu might not say when he plans to have his plants fully automated, however, Otsuka said that AI complements, not threatening, the go-and-see system.
“AI does not ask” Why? Why? “However, humans do. We hope to free them to ask why and how defects occur,” he said. “This will allow more people to pursue tactics for constant production, which is the purpose of ‘genchi genyetsu’. “