As the "central nervous system" of industrial robots, artificial intelligence has been in a stage of continuous and rapid development over the past few years. Many industrial robots have already acquired a high degree of intelligence, but they are still far from reaching the level of intelligence that humans have envisioned. Rome wasn't built in a day, and robots can't become highly intelligent overnight.
The true realization of industrial automation requires highly intelligent industrial robots to replace some of the work done by humans. Obviously, if we want robots to effectively replace human work, the first thing to do is to enable them to "see". Moreover, many intelligent things we use in our daily lives also need to be "seen", including intelligent drones and intelligent vacuum cleaners.
Of course, industrial robots are no exception. Only when industrial robots have the ability to observe things can they make good judgments and thus solve some problems intelligently and flexibly. Moreover, under the great force of Industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing has increasingly higher requirements for industrial robots. Traditional robots that execute a specific action through programming will no longer be able to meet the needs of the manufacturing industry's forward development.
Often, we will need robots to have more advanced functions such as recognition, analysis, and processing. In other words, we need to equip industrial machines with a pair of "eagle eyes" to replace human eyes for measurement and judgment. Machine vision is equivalent to equipping industrial robots with "eyes," enabling them to see objects clearly and tirelessly, and perform the inspection and detection functions of human eyes. This is very important in highly automated large-scale production.
Machine vision systems can use machine vision products, i.e. image acquisition devices, to convert the captured target into image signals and transmit them to a dedicated image processing system to obtain the shape information of the captured target. Based on pixel distribution, brightness, color and other information, the signal is converted into a digital signal. The image system then performs various operations on these signals to extract the target's features, and then controls the on-site equipment based on the judgment results.
In summary, machine vision is the use of computers to simulate human visual functions. It possesses some of the functions of the human brain—extracting information from images of objective things, processing and understanding it, and ultimately using it for automated work such as actual detection, measurement and control in intelligent industrial manufacturing.
Intelligent manufacturing closely integrates industrial robots with machine vision, and machine vision will be the next direction of artificial intelligence.
Machine vision has wide applications in industry and mainly has four functions:
1. Guiding and positioning: Visual positioning requires the machine vision system to quickly and accurately locate the part being measured and confirm its position. Machine vision is used for positioning when loading and unloading, guiding the robotic arm to accurately grasp the parts.
In the semiconductor packaging field, equipment needs to adjust the pick-up head based on the chip position information obtained by machine vision to accurately pick up the chip and bind it. This is the most basic application of vision positioning in the machine vision industry.
2. Appearance Inspection: This step involves inspecting products on the production line for quality issues and replaces the most manual labor. In the pharmaceutical field, machine vision primarily inspects dimensions, bottle appearance defects, bottle shoulder defects, and bottle mouth defects.
3. High-precision testing: Some products have high precision, reaching 0.01 to 0.02 micrometers or even micrometers, which are beyond the reach of the human eye and must be detected by machines.
4. Recognition involves using machine vision to process, analyze, and understand images to identify targets and objects of various patterns. It enables data traceability and collection, and is widely used in automotive parts, food, and pharmaceuticals.
In summary, machine vision systems enhance production flexibility and automation. They are commonly used to replace human vision in hazardous work environments unsuitable for manual labor or in situations where human vision is insufficient. Furthermore, in large-scale industrial production, manual inspection of product quality is inefficient and lacks precision; machine vision inspection methods can significantly improve production efficiency and automation. Moreover, machine vision facilitates information integration, making it a fundamental technology for computer-integrated manufacturing.
China's industrial robot industry has developed rapidly and has reached the world's top level. The demand for industrial upgrading towards intelligent manufacturing, the huge scale of the manufacturing market, the promotion of the Made in China 2025 strategy, and numerous industrial layouts have created the perfect conditions for the development of industrial robots. Manufacturing giants are vying to deploy smart factories. It can be said that the development of the robot industry is progressing at an unstoppable pace, and the demand from the entire manufacturing industry is not to be underestimated. The development of the industrial robot industry will inevitably provide numerous opportunities for machine vision applications.
