For the past few decades, consumers have rewarded companies that customize their products and services to individual tastes and needs. In response, manufacturers have been willing to design, build, and operate production lines that accommodate a growing variety of final products, adding complexity to every step in the process from planning through production, quality assurance, and shipping. Combine this trend with lean operations and just-in-time production, and the manual—and some of the automated processes—that manufacturers depended on in the past can’t keep up with customer expectations and the increasing velocity of business in an e-commerce, always-connected world. Industry 4.0—the age of machine-to-machine communications—aims to solve this problem.

In manufacturing plants and warehouses around the world, industrial automation, including machine vision and robotics, are replacing many manual tasks in manufacturing. However, when it comes to visual quality inspection, or the tedious task of examining products and judging defects, most production lines still employ human workers, often because automated solutions are not up to the task, as replacing the powerful human eye-brain connection is not trivial.