A change in production method at factories and manufacturing plants is taking place. Traditional human labor that owners rely on for inspections has given way to machine vision, whose many benefits are explained in a whitepaper.
A change in production methods at factories and manufacturing plants is taking place. Traditional human labor that owners rely on for inspections has given way to machine vision, whereby machines check for faulty or erroneous operations.
So why is machine vision growingly in use? Cognex, a provider of vision systems and solutions, provided some insights in a whitepaper, saying machine vision excels at quantitative measurement with speediness, accuracy and repeatability. “For example, on a production line, a machine-vision system can provide 100 percent coverage, inspecting hundreds or even thousands of parts per minute. When it comes to assuring product quality, machine vision is available full-time and never takes a coffee break,” it said. “The alternatives to machine vision for inspection — low-cost photo sensors and human inspectors — have their drawbacks. Low-cost photo sensors can perform only a limited number of simple tasks such as position verification, counting, and color checks. Human inspectors can get bored or distracted and may not be able to keep up with production line speeds. Moreover, some manufacturing environments may not be safe for human inspectors.”
In terms of what machine vision can do in a manufacturing setting, the whitepaper gave several use scenarios, for example determining the position of an object, ensuring the package integrity of medical products, and verifying that an object’s properties meet quality standards, such as the position and volume of glue beads used in automobile transmissions.
The whitepaper then listed several industries where machine vision-assisted manufacturing can be beneficial. One is the food and beverage industry. “Machine vision is used on a bottling line to check each bottle for fill level, cap closure, safety ring presence, and label position,” it said. “Shipping products with this type of defect can lead to leakage in shipment, product returns from the retailer, and even a recall order from the FDA.”
Another industry that stands to benefit is medical and pharmaceuticals, where technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) can verify batch codes on soft plastic IV bags.
Finally, there is the automotive industry, which the paper said was one of the largest users of machine vision, executing inspections for parts traceability and compliance with strict quality controls, especially in powertrain components and safety equipment such as brakes and air bags.
“On an automotive production line, it’s common to see hundreds of vision systems and ID readers installed for error proofing and traceability. At the same time, many assembly tasks are still done by hand. In these cases, machine vision is used to check for human errors,” the paper said. “For example, machine vision is used to inspect images of a part assembled by an operator installing two screws and two nuts. The inspection ensures that the screws are completely inserted and that the nuts are installed correctly.”