BMW Employs A.I. Into the Vehicle Production

BMW has made headlines recently as one of the first manufacturing companies employing AI into vehicle production. In the past few years BMW has upgraded its Spartanburg plant in South Carolina, USA to employ new AI capabilities. The Spartanburg facility has an annual capacity of around 450,000 vehicles and is growing year-on-year.

The company is diving into the AI trend, finding new ways to integrate the technology into the manufacturing process. One of the company’s uses for AI is overlooking and managing the body shop processes like welding studs to the frames of cars. A process that was and is performed by robots, but historically was managed by humans, now is fully controlled by AI.

That includes quality control and instructing the manufacturing robots to make corrections if any imperfections are found. This removes all and any human intervention from the process. According to the company, this increases efficiency and saves costs in the long run.

BMW Group Manager Curtis Tingle said that this single update to the manufacturing process has saves the company around $1 million a year. The technology is developed in Spartanburg facility and is patent pending at the moment.

But this is not the only example of AI use in the Spartanburg factory. AI is also being used for quality control during the various stages of assembly. There are 26 different cameras throughout the factory floor that snap pictures that then go through the AI software quality control process and if it spots any issues, those issues are then flagged for humans to inspect and fix.

It is important to note that AI is not there to remove humans from the manufacturing process, but rather help increase production numbers. It is was not possible to manually inspect as many vehicles as it is now with the help of AI.