Drone technology is revolutionizing factory planning. Until now, the acquisition of factory layouts has been a very tedious and error-prone process because the measurement data is still collected manually or at least entered manually into the planning software.
Dominik Melcher has developed an alternative. He is a project engineer at the Institut für Integrierte Produktion Hannover (IPH) gGmbH and has been researching for almost four years how layout recording can be automated – with a drone that flies through the factory floor semi-automatically and gathers all the necessary measurement data in a short time. This data is then automatically used to create a three-dimensional factory layout that can be edited using appropriate planning software.
Melcher presented his research findings at the IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM), which was held as a digital conference in mid-December 2020. He received an Outstanding Paper Award for his conference paper, titled "Automated Data Acquisition and Processing for Factory Layout Planning."
More information on the drone project can be found at http://factorymaps.iph-hannover.de, and information on the conference can be found at http://ieem.org.
