Mirco Moencks

University of Cambridge | Cam ·  Institute for Manufacturing

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming the roles of humans, technology and work in production systems. Although the level of automation on shop floors increases, it is not always feasible or effective to assign the execution of production tasks to autonomous systems. Where total automation is ineffective, new forms of Human-Technology Int...

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing the nature of work, shifting the skill sets required in industry. Yet, many organizations struggle to prepare their workforce for future jobs. Traditional training settings seem to fall short to address this challenge, often being rigid and resource-intensive. This gives rise to novel forms of workforce...

Augmentation technology, which includes diverse technologies such as virtual reality, computer vision and exoskeletons (see Table 1), provides opportunities to develop a human-centric vision of manufacturing – to the benefit of both businesses and their employees. This white paper on the implementation of augmentation technology – which presents th...

In industry, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming the roles of people, technology and work on the shop floor. Despite ongoing strides towards automation, people are anticipated to remain integral contributors in future manufacturing. Where full automation is ineffective or in-feasible, Operator Assistance Systems (OAS) can augment worke...

The manufacturing skills gap, demographic change, and advancing digital transformation are imposing major challenges on production systems and their workforce. These challenges require increased systematic up-and re-skilling of manufacturing employees. Traditional, off-the-job trainings may be insufficient to address changing learning needs-often r...

Because we live in a manufactured world, empowering the manufacturing workforce is crucial. People-centric Production (PCP) in Industry 5.0 places people at the center of the industrial transformation, offering benefits such as bottom-up innovation potential, enhanced shop floor employee engagement, as well as increased acceptance, pace and value-a...

Advances in manufacturing technologies, shorter product lifecycles, and high product variabilities impose increasing demands on manufacturing workers. Yet, the current workforce often lacks the skills to deal with emerging complexities. This gives rise to an important question: How can human-machine systems augment the set of employees’ skills? Ope...

To remain competitive in an increasingly complex manufacturing landscape, organisations are moving beyond a full automation narrative and considering the empowering role of augmentation. Although technology is an important pillar in industry, people remain essential on shop floors and will continue to be so in the future. Where total automation is...

While technology is an important catalyst in manufacturing, people are expected to remain integral contributors on future shop floors. For example, it is not always effective to assign tasks such as error diagnosis and repair to autonomous systems. Even more, where total automation is not the preferred option, augmentation technology and Operator A...

Manufacturing companies face challenges such as shorter product life cycles, higher demand for front-line employees and demographic change in their workforce. One solution to address these challenges is the introduction of Operator Assistance Systems (OAS) to empower the workforce. To ensure a successful implementation and usage of these OAS, howev...

We live in a manufactured world and the manufacturing and production industry is one of the primary sources of economic prosperity for most countries. Industries strive to produce the right goods for the right customer at the right time, location, quantity, quality, and cost. In addition to this overarching objective, they are faced with a set of c...

Although shop floors become more automated, manual labor is more than the sum of recurring tasks which can simply be executed by autonomous machines. Where total automation is ineffective, operator assistance systems (OAS) could increase productivity and empower the workforce. Operator Assistance Systems (OAS) are systems that interact with operato...

Increasingly, the task of detecting and recognizing the actions of a human has been delegated to some form of neural network processing camera or wearable sensor data. Due to the degree to which the camera can be affected by lighting and wearable sensors scantiness, neither one modality can capture the required data to perform the task confidently....

The increasing demand for product customisation is leading to higher complexities within manufacturing. This imposes new challenges for the workforce. One way to support operators’ productivity may be context-aware, human-centred cyber-physical assistance systems. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a promising approach to enable context-awareness....

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a key building block of many emerging applications such as intelligent mobility, sports analytics, ambient-assisted living and human-robot interaction. With robust HAR, systems will become more human-aware, leading towards much safer and empathetic autonomous systems. While human pose detection has made significa...