SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT Machine Visiony Bosch relies on autonomous machine
vision for quality inspection The company tested the world’s first autonomous visual inspection product
P
lastic injection moulding poses problems for traditional machine vision systems,” said Zohar Kantor, VP of Sales and
Project Management at Inspekto. “The highly-refl ective surface of plastic is hard to illuminate correctly. In addition, if the background material, mould and plastic polymer are of similar colour, and the available illumination is anything but ideal; lack of contrast can make it very diffi cult for the machine-vision system to work. Combine this with the fact that traditional systems can only inspect one type of product at a time — as well as there are product lines in diff erent colours and sizes — it’s easy to see why a fundamental change in machine vision is needed.”
Bosch at Waiblingen In Waiblingen, Bosch produces plastic moulded connectors for vehicles, specialising in motor plugs and various device and sensor connectors. The plant has diff erent production lines and injection moulding machines. There are conventional state-of-the-art machine vision solutions, some developed internally and some created and integrated by external machine-vision solution providers.
Nevertheless, not all these solutions are suitable for some of Bosch’s applications, especially where the item to inspect has black polymer on black background. In these conditions, it is almost impossible to set the parameters for the QA solution to recognise defects.
14 September 2020 | Automation
In these cases, the plant checks the connectors manually, which gives rise to not spotting defects, as well as the cost of personnel.
Bosch then decided to approach Inspekto to fi nd a suitable solution.
Plug & Inspect technology Autonomous Machine Vision (AMV) is a new category of machine vision for quality assurance invented by Inspekto, a German company with Israeli DNA. In 2018, the company launched its fi rst AMV system, the INSPEKTO S70, establishing a ground- breaking approach to QA. “The INSPEKTO S70 is the fi rst standalone
product for visual QA, gating and sorting,” said Kantor. “It is self-setting, self-learning and self-adjusting and can be used to inspect any item, in any industry, produced with any handling method.” “The product comes out of the box with everything the user needs to start inspecting products right away. The installation process is designed to be quick and easy. The plant’s own staff can set up and train the system without using an external systems integrator. Most importantly, the S70 only requires an average of 20 to 30 good samples to learn the characteristics of a perfect product. Therefore, there’s no need to set up parameters to train the system to recognise mistakes, like with traditional solutions,” added Kantor. Because of these advantages, Bosch decided
to run a pilot project in Waiblingen. Inspekto and Bosch started an application partnership and, after a few weeks, the fi rst system was
ready for use in series production. “The initial installation of the pilot system took about an hour, and less than a day if you factor in the small adjustments we made to optimise the speed of the process. It took another 20 minutes to learn the software program, and then we just had to plug in the camera and begin inspecting,” said one of the development engineers at Bosch.
Cost reduction and quality improvement During the installation, the production line kept running as normal, without any plant downtime.
“Because the INSPEKTO S70 can run without any input from the control system, it can be installed without aff ecting production,” said the Bosch development engineer. “Initially, we had the S70 running in parallel with the production line, where we integrated it mechanically but without connecting it to the machine. The system then learned the characteristics of the product quickly. All of this was done without any impact on production.” “The cost of the initial system was amortised in under a month and we could immediately see further savings and an improvement in quality. Because the pilot system worked so well, we ordered another one for our subsidiaries overseas, then another one to be installed in an older application in Waiblingen,” he added.
CONTACT:
Inspekto
www.inspekto.com
automationmagazine.co.uk
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