Imprensa Nacional – Casa de Moeda, S. A. presents a particularly ambitious challenge to robotic manipulation: the dexterous handling of passports. The production of electronic passports is constrained by strict international rules and recommendations to guarantee the security of critical data and access to data of the documents. The required rigorous quality control will be automated to reduce human error and increase productivity.
The rigorous quality control process requires unwavering attention, but repetitive and monotonous operations quickly tire human workers. Collaborating with a robot that automates the quality control process will lead to an accelerated process and lower error rates.
Within the demonstration of UC 3, INCM faced some challenges that can be summarized as follows:
– for security reasons (imposed by ISO14298 for security documents production) the demonstration could not be done inside the line;
– the demonstration room, closed to the production line, turned out to be small for all the persons attending the workshop and demo. Mitigation of it included repeating some of the processes so that all persons could properly see it.
That being said, there were no issues during the demonstration itself.
A very relevant element, as far as the demonstration of the Use Case 3 on Passport Quality Control, is the assessment of the engagement shown by the participants and the results obtained from the data collected in this regard. In this respect, the following is reported:
– For the workshop session there were only a few questions;
– The Q&A after the demonstration of the system was long and very enthusiastic from several persons, from the workers to the chiefs;
– The workers that work in the tasks being reproduced, pointed out some improvements to the system that would be necessary before the deployment of a real system. They were reserved, but mildly enthusiastic;
– Some of the Directors were very enthusiastic. In particular two that envisioned another process being made by INCM that would highly benefit from a system like that.
Below, find some photos of a Portuguese passport, indicating the challenges of automated quality control.
