Thumbs up or thumbs down determined the fate of defeated gladiators in ancient Rome. Now 2000 years later, hand gestures decide the destiny of BMW bumpers.
The BMW plant in Landshut, Germany runs pretty much like other BMW plants, except for the post-paint quality control station for bumpers. Pretty soon, quality control points at Landshut and throughout the rest of the BMW Group manufacturing world may resemble the Landshut bumper station, where the workers love to wave and point.
Wave and point? That sounds like what happens at a BMW CCA event where members meet and greet each other and look at everyone else’s cars.
But in a pilot project at Landshut, waving and pointing have very specific meanings and functions. After bumpers have been through the paint shop, they undergo a quality control check in which the workers use hand gestures to indicate the results. Bumpers have always been checked before they were installed. To reach a 100 percent quality level, each deviation was recorded in a system and evaluated. In the past, workers documented the result for each component in a computer terminal. Sometimes the computer was not near the inspection point so the worker had to walk to where the computer was to input the data.
Yes, this was time-consuming and inefficient. If several faults were caught at different positions at the same time, documenting them became more complex, with workers being required to remember several details precisely.
The solution, developed by BMW in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute in Karlsruhe and tested in Landshut, was a camera-based system that recognizes hand gestures. The system is similar to some virtual video games, but with greater precision and, since it’s not a game, greater consequences.
“The system recognizes the interaction between the person and the bumper,” explains the BMW Group’s responsible project coordinator Ramona Tremmel. “A wiping motion across the component marks the bumper as flawless. If a worker points their finger at a faulty section of the bumper, however, cameras register this gesture.” The program then evaluates it and stores the entry.
The gesture detection system is controlled by two 3D cameras each, which are mounted above the workstations. Each camera is fitted with sensors that beam infrared light through a filter, projecting an invisible grid of points with fixed coordinates that creates on the computer a 3D model of each bumper. “When a worker points to the bumper, the coordinates of certain points change because they are reflected by the hand,” Tremmel describes. The system stores the data and evaluates it so that people do not have to leave their workplaces any more to evaluate the bumpers. “The required sensor technology is installed in such a way that the standard workflow is not affected,” Tremmel states.
Workers do not need additional devices such as special eyewear or microphones. The system speeds up the quality control and data entry is extremely precise. According to Tremmel, “the workers have responded very positively to the new technology. The gesture interaction is simple and easy to understand and can be applied intuitively, without requiring extra training time. People do not have to walk to other workstations anymore and can concentrate better on their work.”
The pilot phase of this system has been declared successful. The plant is now preparing to implement the system in series production.
BMW Group Plant Landshut employs about 3,500 people to manufacture engine and chassis components from light metal castings, plastics components for the vehicle exterior, carbon-fiber car body components, cockpit and equipment scopes, electrical drive systems, special drivetrains, and drive shafts. These components are delivered to all BMW Group vehicle and engine plants worldwide. The Landshut plant is the BMW Group’s Center of Innovation and Production for the future technologies of lightweight construction and e-mobility, so it is involved in early stages of the development of new vehicles.
The integration of hand gestures into the human-computer quality control interface makes perfect sense because it is intuitive and simple. We can only assume that the system is sophisticated enough that a bumper doesn’t get approved simply because workers wave to their buddies who are on their way to join them in the lunch room.—Scott Blazey
