Human-Centered Manufacturing Challenges Affecting European Industry 4.0 Enabling Technologies

Industry 4.0 implies the digitization of the shopfloor combining technologies such as sensors, augmented reality, and wearable robots that transform the manufacturing environment into a workplace where human-machine interactive symbiosis. As manufacturing companies develop strategies to innovate and engage with the digital transformation, the reality of the enabling technologies demonstrate serious challenges to the wider organizational adoption beyond the pilot phase albeit the promising evaluation results. This paper presents two cases based on two European research projects encompassing representatives of different industrial sectors and distils the challenges encountered that raise barriers to wider adoption.