AUTOMOTIVE


Electric dreams


As car makers install production lines for electric vehicles, Greg Blackman looks at how vision is currently used in their factories


S


elf-driving cars and electric vehicles are where automotive companies


are investing for the future. Both involve imaging, directly in the case of autonomous vehicles, and indirectly for quality control in the factories being built to produce electric motors. At the beginning of July, Volkswagen and Ford announced a joint venture, whereby VW is investing in Ford’s autonomous driving company Argo AI, valued at $7bn, while Ford will get access to VW’s electric vehicle technology. Ford says it will design and build at least one high-volume, fully electric vehicle in Europe starting in 2023 using VW’s Modular Electric Toolkit. VW started developing the electric vehicle platform in 2016, investing $7bn; it plans to build 15 million electric cars in the next decade. Te investment in e-mobility


opens up opportunities for factory automation and machine vision. Tibault Bautze, sales manager at Blackbird Robotersysteme, a provider of scanning systems for laser welding, said installations of its technology is rising, now that the e-mobility market is ramping up. He also noted many laser system integrators and suppliers were showing copper hairpin laser welding at the recent Laser World of Photonics trade fair – the hairpins form part of electric motors. Vision is used in many of these


types of laser welding machines, according to Bautze, especially for laser welding where the scanner remains static. Here, cameras are used to detect a part’s position and align the weld seam to the geometry of the workpiece before welding. ‘Tis technology has been around for 10 years, but we see a huge market demand, especially for e-mobility applications,’ Bautze said, such as welding copper hairpins. Te workpiece doesn’t move


when making a hairpin weld. It’s therefore efficient to image the entire workpiece before welding, to pre-program the path of the laser beam. A Blackbird Robotersysteme


scanner has its own camera; image processing is via the same user interface and soſtware that takes care of scanner control. Te user can directly assign a camera task to map the path of the beam. Te scanners use standard


industrial cameras, working in the visible or near infrared wavelength range – imaging at any wavelength less than 1µm normally works, because the scanner optics transmit light at these wavelengths. ‘Image quality is important,’


said Bautze. ‘We have to consider all kinds of optical distortion generated by the scanner, especially when moving around in the scanner envelope. Te camera is calibrated to operate across


22 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • August/September 2019 If you use fillet


welds, you need to hit the edge of the workpiece with the laser exactly. This is why you need seam tracking


the entire working envelope of the scanner, to make sure that wherever the camera focuses in the x-y envelope of the scanner, the picture is sharp and we know exactly where in the image the laser will hit the workpiece.’ Blackbird Robotersysteme


uses its own illumination for its imaging system: four LED stripes


mounted close to the welding head with a filter on the lens to cut out ambient light. ‘Customers want one machine


for welding different workpieces and parts from different suppliers,’ Bautze continued. ‘Te conditions of the welding process might change over time. If this is a fully automated machine, it’s important that the image processing takes care of detecting the workpiece and aligning the welding process, or even skipping the welding process if the machine finds the workpiece is not what it’s supposed to be. It’s a last line of defence, because once you switch on a laser you’ve got a lot of heat in the laser cabin, and if the workpiece is incorrect, the beam


@imveurope www.imveurope.com


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