I work with large scale flat pack furniture manufacturing. Unattended machining is possible and not uncommon. You have a large tool changer on the CNC, an auto loader to get material on the CNC, and then a stock warehousing robot to fetch the material. You just talk to one of the large equipment manufacturers and they'll sell you this sort of setup.
This seems like a strange problem to try and solve. As a former software developer I see problems every day that AI or advanced expert systems could solve I'd love to chat with these guys. If they solved some of the problems with QC or Packing the industry would be clawing at their doors to buy their products. Not to mention the outdated state of most CAM / nesting packages.
Being software developers by nature and having got ourselves into CNC we feel exactly the same. It is crazy to us how easy it is to make a dumb and costly mistake.
So we are tackling it one little thing at a time to make operators life slightly less stressful.
We're always open for a discussion so feel free to reach out ( the contacts are on the site of the blog )
This seems like a strange problem to try and solve. As a former software developer I see problems every day that AI or advanced expert systems could solve I'd love to chat with these guys. If they solved some of the problems with QC or Packing the industry would be clawing at their doors to buy their products. Not to mention the outdated state of most CAM / nesting packages.