Machine vision is an essential means to achieve industrial automation and intelligence. It is equivalent to the extension of human vision on machines. Machine vision generally has advantages such as high automation, high efficiency, high precision, and adaptability to harsh environments. Today, let's take a look at the five major application advantages of machine vision in industrial automation.
01 Guidance and Positioning
Visual positioning requires machine vision systems to quickly and accurately locate the parts being measured and confirm their position. Machine vision is used for positioning during loading and unloading to guide the robotic arm to grasp the parts accurately.
In applications combining machine vision and robotics, robot-guided localization is the most common application. Robot localization guidance can be broadly categorized into three modes:
▶ Fixed camera mode
The camera is mounted on the equipment frame and does not move with the robot. From left to right, the modes are divided into gripping mode, gripping offset correction mode, and placement mode. In the gripping mode, the camera photographs and roughly positions the incoming material, transmitting the positioning information to the robot so that the robot can grip the material based on the positioning information. This reduces the accuracy requirements of the inter-station conveying mechanism and ensures the stability of gripping.
▶ Action Camera Mode
This involves mounting the camera at the top of the robotic arm and moving it along with the arm. While different from the fixed camera mode described above, both the fixed camera and moving camera modes achieve the same functional goal: positioning, grasping, and guided placement. Both modes, while maintaining functionality, offer greater installation possibilities to address different environmental and hardware limitations.
▶ Combination of fixed camera and action camera modes
To enhance the adaptability of hardware installation and to cater to different equipment installation scenarios, the fixed camera mode and action camera mode can be used in combination.
Furthermore, in the semiconductor manufacturing field, adjusting the chip position information of the pick-up head is very difficult, but machine vision can solve this problem because it is necessary to accurately pick up and bind the chip. This is why visual positioning has become the most basic application of machine vision in the industrial field.
02 Appearance Inspection
Inspecting products on the production line for quality issues is the step that replaces the most manual labor. For example, in the pharmaceutical field, machine vision is mainly used for dimensional inspection, detection of defects in bottle appearance, detection of defects in bottle shoulders, and inspection of bottle mouths.
( Yinglai Case Study: Visual Inspection of Magnesia-Carbon Bricks)
With the development of modern industrial automation, machine vision inspection has been widely used in various inspection, measurement and part identification , such as infrared cut-off filter surface defect detection, automobile wheel hub model identification, magnetic material appearance defect detection, barcode and character recognition on product packaging, etc. The common feature of these applications is continuous mass production and very high requirements for appearance quality.
(Inlai Case Study: Bogie Vision Inspection System)
Typically, highly repetitive and intelligent tasks like this can only be completed manually. We often see hundreds, even thousands, of inspection workers performing this process behind modern factory production lines. This significantly increases labor and management costs for the factory, yet still doesn't guarantee a 100% pass rate. Machine vision inspection, with its automated, objective, non-contact, and high-precision characteristics, can completely replace manual inspection of these single, repetitive procedures. Compared to general image processing systems, machine vision inspection emphasizes accuracy, speed, and reliability in industrial environments.
03 High-precision detection
Some products require high precision, reaching 0.01~0.02m or even micrometers, which are beyond the reach of the human eye and must be inspected by machines. In production and daily life, every product needs to be inspected to determine its quality and requires a certificate of conformity. It's safe to say that machine vision is the most widely used application in inspection. In the past, when machine vision was less developed, manual visual inspection often encountered many problems, such as low accuracy, susceptibility to errors, inability to work continuously, fatigue, and being time-consuming and labor-intensive. The widespread application of machine vision has brought product manufacturing and inspection into a highly automated process.
The most typical examples are coin character detection and circuit board inspection. Machine vision is also used for the inspection of RMB minting processes, which requires extremely high precision, involves numerous pieces of equipment, and involves complex procedures. Other applications include machine vision for positioning and inspection, checking the quality and defects of beverage bottle caps, detecting and recognizing barcode characters on products, detecting defects in glass bottles, and inspecting pharmaceutical glass bottles. The pharmaceutical field is also one of the main application areas of machine vision.
04 Recognition
Image recognition utilizes machine vision to process, analyze, and understand images in order to identify targets and objects of various patterns. It enables data traceability and collection, and is widely used in fields such as automotive parts, food, and pharmaceuticals.
The most typical example is QR code recognition. QR codes and barcodes are extremely common in our lives. In the production of goods, manufacturers store a lot of data in small QR codes to manage and trace products. With the increasingly widespread application of machine vision image recognition, barcodes on various material surfaces have become very easy to identify, read, and detect, thereby improving the level of modernization, greatly increasing production efficiency, and gradually reducing production costs.
05 Object Sorting
In machine vision applications, object sorting is a step that follows recognition and detection. The machine vision system processes the images and combines them with the use of robotic arms to achieve product sorting.
In the past, materials were manually placed into injection molding machines on production lines before proceeding to the next step. Now, automated equipment is used for material distribution, employing machine vision systems to capture and analyze product images, outputting results, and then robots to place the corresponding materials in fixed positions, thereby achieving intelligent, modern, and automated industrial production.
Summarize
With the progress of industrial development and the arrival of Industry 4.0, machine intelligence is gradually becoming a reality. In particular, the recent development of machine vision technology in industrial automation, and the continuous updating and iteration of vision technology, have made its position in intelligent manufacturing increasingly prominent, and have also promoted the progress of industries such as industrial automation, artificial intelligence, and intelligent manufacturing, bringing stronger development momentum to various fields.
