Fokker IoT Challenge: gathering new ideas

F
okker Technologies works in the aerospace industry, specialising in designing, developing and manufacturing aircraft systems for aircraft manufacturers. In 2015, they decided to go outside the company and take part in our IoT Academy Smart Factory Challenge with the hope that they will gain some more insights in what they could do to transform their Hoogeveen factory into a smart factory with integrated IoT systems.

The three sub challenges were:

  1. How can Fokker monitor resources and semi-finished products in their process?
  2. How to identify employee’s smarter?
  3. How is Fokker able to track their tools?

The winner of the challenge was Ming Chan and here were his solutions to each of those sub challenges:

1: Smart Identification

During the fabrication process, some workers may not have the right qualifications to work with some of the products or are not up to date with some specific procedures. Using facial recognition, low cost hardware and open source software, you are able to identify the user and check if they are allowed to proceed. If they are not allowed, they receive a warning or a supervisor is alerted.

2: Inventory and Process Management

Chan was amazed at how a high tech facility like Fokker was still using old fashioned log book writing to record the inventory within the warehouse. His ‘Smart Stick’ idea got rid of the paperwork, manual writing and searching for inventory that has not gone out of date.  

3: Self-spotting

To track how Fokker uses their machine tools, the ‘transponder’ was designed whereby products that were produced were certified by the workers for quality. There would also be no more manually checking of the vacuum and connecting of temperature probes.

Check out more information about the Fokker Smart Factory Challenge here:

 

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