Cognition in Manual Assembly

Abstract

Manual assembly conducted by skilled human workers is of outstanding relevance for flexible production with high precision. Nevertheless, due to capacity limitations humans need to be supported during the working process in order to reduce mental workload and for enhancement of performance. Cognitive technical systems are able to do so by adapting the process of production to the properties of human cognitive processes which are relevant in manual assembly. During manual assembly tasks workers are confronted with various sources of information and have to switch rapidly between different tasks. The complexity of task execution can be reduced by appropriate information presentation and planning of work steps. Firstly, information processing during the working process can be supported by attentional guidance while reducing search times and accelerating assembly execution. Secondly, as there exist many possible assembly sequences for one product the optimal order of single assembly steps has to be found and interferences from previous task steps have to be minimized. The article describes two scenarios for the investigation of attention allocation as well as for the investigation of task sequences and gives a summary of results achieved so far.