Tag: News

This month, we’re going to discuss the aspects of design in your product which could affect the ability to apply automated visual inspection using vision systems to the production process. This can be a frustrating aspect for the engineering and quality managers when they’ve been asked to safeguard bad products going out of the door using machine vision, but there has been no attempt up the chain at the product design stages to either design the product in an effective way to make it simple to manufacture or to apply vision inspection to the process. Once the design has been signed off and validated, it’s often extremely difficult to get small changes instigated, and engineering is then tasked with the mass production and assembly of a product, with in-line visual inspection required.

Very often in medical device manufacturing, due to the long lifetime and cycles of products, the design was conceived months, or even years before it goes through a process of small batch production, before moving to mass production at high run rates – all this with the underlining aspect of validation to GAMP and FDA production protocols. This is the point when automated inspection will be integral to the quality and safeguarding of the consumer as part of the manufacturing process.

From our experience, we see the following red flags which could have been addressed at the design phase, which make the vision system more difficult to design and run.

1. Variants. Often, there can be too many variants of a product with additional variants of sub-assemblies, which means the number of final product variations can run to hundreds. While the vision system may be able to cope with this variation, it makes set-up more costly and ongoing maintenance more difficult. Sometimes, these variations are due to multiple customers down the line wanting subtle changes or unique part numbers, which the design team happily accommodate with no thought on the impact on the manufacturing process. The more variation which can be removed from the design phase, the easier and more cost-effective a solution for machine vision inspection will be.

2. Lack of specification in surface/material conditions. The settings for a machine vision system will depend on a product’s surface and material conditions. This is especially critical in surface inspection or any process where the segmentation of the background is required from the foreground – so presence verification, inclusion detection and even edge detection for gauging and measurement in machine vision. Suppose conditions vary too much due to a lack of specification on colour or surface being included in the design. This variation can make the vision system more susceptible to false failures or higher maintenance. While latest-generation artificial intelligence (AI) vision systems are making such analysis easier and less prone to failure in these conditions, having as little deviation in your incoming image quality for vision inspection makes sense. The design should include a specification on the surface conditions expected for repeatable manufacturing and inspection, which, for example, in plastic mould colour specification can be challenging to specify.

3. Inability to see the inspection area. In the past, we’ve been asked to automatically inspect surfaces which can’t be seen due to a lack of clear view from any angle. The product’s design is such that perhaps datum edges and points are too far away and not easily accessible. The design could be such that an overhang or other feature obscures the view. This is often the case in large sub-assemblies where the datum edge can be in a completely different area and angle to the area where vision inspection will be applied. Design engineers should assess the feasibility of applying automated inspection to the process to account for how easily the vision system can access certain areas and conditions. We often discuss such applications with manufacturing engineers, with the frustration from their side that the design engineers could have incorporated cut-outs or areas which would have provided a clear line of sight for the vision system to be applied.

4. Handling. Products should be designed to be easily handled, fed and presented to a vision system as part of the process. There will nearly always be a contact surface on tooling for handling, which will then limit the area where the vision system can view. Sometimes, this surface requires critical inspection, and the site is obscured due to the product’s design. For example, in syringe body inspection, the plastic body can be held by the top and the bottom and rotated, meaning some areas of the mould are not visible. If a lip had been designed in, the part could have been inspected twice, held differently, thus providing 100% inspection of the entire surface. Small design changes can impact both the manufacturing and automated vision inspection process. Smaller products can be inspected on glass dials and fixtures to mitigate this issue, but the design team should consider these issues at the start of the design process.

Product design needs to get input from the manufacturing and quality team early in the design process. Now vision systems are a standard part of the modern automated production process and an invaluable tool in the industry 4.0 flexible production concept; thought needs to be given to how subtle design changes and more detailed specification requirements on colour and surface quality in the design stage can help the integration and robust use of vision systems.

Industrial Vision Systems (IVS), a supplier of inspection machines to industry, has launched a range of new optical sorting machines specifically for the high-speed sorting of small components such as fasteners, rings, plastic parts, washers, nuts, munitions and micro components. The devices provide automatic inspection, sorting, grading and classification of products at up to 600 parts per minute. The systems intercept and reject failed parts at high speed, discovering shifts in quality, and providing quality assurance through the production cycle.

The new Optical Sorting Machines from IVS utilise the latest vision inspection algorithms allowing manufacturers to focus on other activities while the fully automated sorting machines root out rogue products and make decisions on quality automatically. For classification checks, the systems use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning, providing the machines with an ability to “learn by example” and improve as more data is captured.

The glass disc of the machine provides 360-degree inspection enabling the system to act as the ‘eyes’ on the factory floor and record production trends and data. By intercepting and rejecting failed parts at high speed, it gives manufacturers the ability to provide 100% automatically inspected product to their customers, without human intervention.

With real-time data and comprehensive reporting to see defect rates, this enables engineers to immediately respond to problems and take corrective action before products are delivered to a customer.

Andrew Waller, director at Industrial Vision Systems, said: “Our machines allow manufacturers to stay ahead of their competitors. These new systems are designed for manufacturers of mass-produced, small products which previously would have struggled to sort quality concerns. We can perceive and detect defects others miss at high-speed. Our optical sorting technology takes vision inspection to the next level. Clear, ultra-high-definition images allow our new generation of systems to recognise even the hardest to spot flaws and to sort wrong batch parts. This allows our customers to achieve continuous yield reductions, categorise failures based on their attributes, and build better products.”

Industrial Vision Systems (IVS®), a supplier of machine vision systems to industry, has launched the IVS-COMMAND-Ai™ in-line inspection solution designed for high-speed automated visual inspection, helping reduce manufacturer fines and protecting brand reputations. The IVS-COMMAND-Ai Vision Sensors integrate directly with all factory information and control systems, allowing complete part inspection, guidance, tracking and traceability with additional built-in image and data saving.

For those applications requiring complex classification, the IVS-COMMAND-Ai system utilises the latest deep learning artificial intelligence (ai) vision inspection algorithms. New multi-layered “bio-inspired” deep neural networks allow the latest IVS® machine vision solutions to mimic the human brain activity in learning a task, thus allowing vision systems to recognise images, perceive trends and understand subtle changes in images which represent defects.

Designed for complex manufacturing industries such as medical devices, pharmaceuticals, food & drink and automotive, the IVS-COMMAND-Ai Vision Systems are fitted with adaptable HD smart cameras to provide inspection from all angles and at high precision. This allows production lines to review and alert any flaws and defects in real-time, providing instant factory information on compatible devices. It also possesses speeds of up to 60 frames per second and can quickly be integrated on-line to inspect high speed and static products.

By achieving a robust inspection performance, the new IVS-COMMAND-Ai Vision Systems oversees complex vision inspections such as presence verification, OCR and gauging through to surface, defect and quality inspection in one solution. Comprehensive Statistical Process Control (SPC) data also provides closed-loop control to further safeguard production.

All IVS vision sensors can be integrated onto production lines, assembly cells, workbenches, robots and linear slides. Their robust design allows vision sensor integration into any industrial production process for seamless inspection, identification or guidance.

Earl Yardley, director at Industrial Vision Systems, comments: “Our vision systems are very easy to program, are highly accurate, offer easy maintenance and provide peace of mind in final quality acceptance. However, the IVS-COMMAND-Ai vision systems take it a step further. It is the complete, robust quality control inspection vision sensor solution, and it is ready to be deployed in all manufacturing environments. It will improve yield and deliver immediate improvements to product quality; and at these critical times, reliability and consistency are vital.”

Vision Sensors

Industrial Vision Systems Ltd (IVS), a supplier of quality control vision systems to industries including medical device, pharmaceuticals, automotive, food and electronics, is launching a series of new features across its full range of inspection machines. This innovative functionality, which includes multi-language support and updated inspection features, is designed to give manufacturers increased brand and warranty protection and to allow systems to be deployed in more diverse production environments.

IVS’s new multi-language support means the visualisation of process information can now be displayed in real-time between supported languages. These include English, Chinese, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Czech. To conform to the Machinery Directive of the European Union, languages can be switched during the automatic operation of the IVS system. This will benefit IVS’s growing international customer-base who are integrating its systems and machines in global locations, as well as UK manufacturers with a diverse ethnic workforce.

Inspection capability has also been upgraded. One such function is contour matching for enhanced verification. IVS now offers an improved integrated inspection capability that enables pattern matching using geometric contour features. The functionality allows more robust feature extraction, especially in environments of uneven illumination or obscured objects. This will help functions such as part verification, pattern recognition, label checking and robot positioning.
IVS has also introduced improved data handling across its full range of machines. As a result, large datasets of inspection data and images can now be visualised with live updates of information registers on the machine interface, allowing for faster feedback and control. This allows production and quality managers to have better information on the quality levels achieved in their factories. These advanced features are set to be rolled out across all IVS machines over the coming months.

Earl Yardley, Industrial Vision Systems Director, comments: “We are continuing to innovate and improve our product offering. The additional multi-language features benefit our customers by increasing productivity and allowing our vision system solutions to be deployed globally. Innovation is within our DNA. Our solutions continue to be developed on the very latest machine vision algorithms and industry-defining usability for automated visual inspection machines. These new features will benefit all the industry sectors we work in, from medical device manufacturers through to printing & packaging customers.”