Integration of visual quality control services in manufacturing lines

Abstract

The paper discusses a new method for integrating visual quality control in highly dynamic manufacturing lines where new products are added in the production inventory and older products are removed from production. In such dynamic lines a new approach for visual inspection is required, a method which requires that the new tasks for visual quality control should be included in the product data and not in the vision/robot programs. The paper proposes a system for visual quality control which allows to define new inspection tasks and to modify the old ones without intervening in the production process. The visual inspection task is defined, linked with a product data and stored on the production server; when a product must be created the task definition is retrieved from the server, a special program on the robot station is parsing the data and executes the vision checks, after which the results are reported. The paper is structured in five chapters presenting the motivation of the paper and trends in visual quality inspection, the product data and visual inspection task definition, the vision systems used, the manufacturing line and ends with experimental results and conclusions. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.