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Overview

The use of Automated Visual Inspection provides the following Benefits:

• Reduced waste
• Increased speed of production
• Optimisation of machines and processes
• Guaranteed product quality – “zero defects”
• Evidence of inspection – full traceability
• Reduced time-to-market for new products/lines
• Reduced development costs

In industry today, quality goals are tightening, production throughputs are increasing, and the demand for productivity improvements continues. To ensure that products are to specification and meet customer expectations, the need for automated reliable inspection during manufacture is extremely important especially where medium to high volume production rates are required.

The application of vision system in manufacturing and production environments is almost endless – see below. Since vision system inspection is non contact it is also possible to take measurements of novel parameters that would not be possible by conventional inspectors. If a feature can be seen using a camera, then the opportunity to inspect it, gauge it, verify it, or guide it, becomes a real possibility of for being controlled by an automated vision system.

• Product identification
• Shapes matching
• Dimensional checking
• Defects, including scratches, dents, blemishes, flaws, cracks and chips, missing objects or foreign bodies
• Colour checking
• Labelling identification

Robot Vision
Using a vision system provides robots with another sense – sight. This enables robots to accurately locate the position and orientation of components to enable simple robots perform complex pick and place operations.

Vision System Applications: An Example
A Pharmaceutical company who manufactures biological materials that are contained in glass ampoules has found that during a production run of several thousand ampoules, the seal on some occasions is not satisfactory, as shown below. A visual inspection of the finished ampoules is carried out manually to check for quality of the seal.

A computer controlled vision system could be employed to achieve the following inspection method improvements:-

• Rigorous and reliable 100% inspection of all ampoules
• Automatic Rejection of ‘failed’ ampoules (if interfaced with the existing reject mechanism)
• Full traceability of % of pass and fail ampoules, together with visual evidence of pass/fail ampoules as required.

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