Operator integrated – concept for manufacturing intelligence

Increasing autonomy and sustainability are major goals in manufacturing. Main technological trends provide enablers for achieving these goals and need to be implemented and combined in manufacturing machinery in a suitable manner. The paper exposes a vision of modern manufacturing machines, where the complexity of manufacturing processes is handled within the manufacturing machine and a simplistic front end is presented to the operator, which means that major elements of operators’ tasks are fulfilled by the intelligence of the machine. Research vectors paving the ground for this concept from different points of view are then discussed. Research is presented on intelligent grinding, intelligent recognition and suppression of chatter, adaptive thermal and motion error compensation exploting also self-learning abilities. It is necessary to point out, that not only intelligent mastering of process and machine becomes more and more important but communications among machine tools enabling process chain overarching intelligent approaches and creating intelligent factories.