Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1022231
56 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2018 Feature Interview by Stephen Las Marias I-CONNECT007 Peter Krippner is the COO of Viscom AG, a manufacturer of automatic inspection systems including 3D AOI. Prior to that, he was the manager of software development and for 17 years, head of the company's Serial Products (SP) business unit. In an interview with SMT007 Magazine, Krippner talks about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact in the electronics manufactur- ing industry. Stephen Las Marias: What can you say about AI and its role in manufacturing? Peter Krippner: Whereas practical solutions like optical character recognition have become routine technologies and are rather not seen as AI, a very good example for artificial intelli- gence is autonomous driving, where individual vehicles make driving decisions self-sufficient and independent. In manufacturing, custom- ers have voiced an increasing interest in oper- ating SMT lines with fewer personnel; more precisely, with a maximum of two persons per line for all associated activities including AOI operation and verification. In such a scenario, AI has the potential to be very helpful. Las Marias: Which part of the electronics manu- facturing process will greatly benefit from AI? Krippner: From our perspective, first, this is going to be the support and automation of AOI verification and then AOI programming. Differ- ent levels of automation will be available, so the customer can also proceed systematically. Initially, the AI can monitor human verification and report any deviating results (e.g., by issu- ing a message that it would classify a potential error differently than the operator). In Stage 2, the AI can assume more and more respon- sibility, and finally verify all components fully automatically. As for AOI programming, we are now work- ing on automatic detection of housing types for the creation of inspection programs. With the help of "deep learning" mathematical AI-Powered Inspection