In the ever-evolving landscape of industrial automation, Profile Solutions and ATEK Integrated Engineering’s recent collaboration is being touted by both companies as having set a new standard for quality control in manufacturing.
Together, they have successfully delivered four state-of-the-art Turnkey Quality Centres, all leveraging machine vision to create a modular, scalable and adaptable automated production quality system.
The companies say this project highlights the teams' advanced expertise in machine vision, providing precise and reliable solutions tailored to customers' production lines.
The Quality Centres each integrate a leak tester, scale, and vision system into a compact and highly efficient unit. These units were installed across four production lines, driving significant improvements in quality assurance.
The vision system plays a central role in ensuring the manufacturing process meets stringent quality standards.
One of the key features of the integrated vision system is its ability to conduct neck inspection circularity and detect the presence of inclusions.
The system accurately measures the neck of the blow-moulded components and calculates the oval-shaped deviations. This data is displayed on the user interface, providing operators with a clear, real-time view of the part's quality.
Additionally, the system’s inclusion detection capability identifies unwanted particles or imperfections within the neck, enabling operators to set acceptance/rejection thresholds. The result is higher quality products and greater process control.
In collaboration with Profile Solutions, ATEK Integrated Engineering developed a novel solution for material thickness testing, using a unique approach where a light source is passed through the material, and the camera detects the light’s penetration.
This method allows operators to easily assess the thickness of the material and set the threshold for accept/reject criteria. By integrating this technology into the production process, it delivers benefits from faster and more reliable material inspections.
One of the standout features of this project is the remote commissioning process.
Profile Solutions and ATEK were able to remotely commission the vision systems via an internet connection, ensuring a smooth and efficient setup despite the geographical distance. This remote capability provided significant benefits, including reduced downtime and faster implementation.
The system’s performance has been highly praised by the customer, with the vision system proving stable and reliable in operation, and ATEK’s remote commissioning service ensuring a seamless experience.
While traditional machine vision systems rely heavily on predefined algorithms and rules, the advent of deep learning has opened up new possibilities for more advanced and complex vision tasks, such as anomaly detection and other quality inspection challenges.
Deep learning involves training neural networks with large amounts of labelled data, enabling the system to learn features directly from raw images and identify patterns that may not be immediately obvious to human inspectors.
In the context of manufacturing and quality control, deep learning algorithms can be particularly effective for anomaly detection – spotting defects or abnormalities in the production process that traditional systems might miss.
Looking ahead, the application of deep learning will continue to redefine the possibilities for vision systems, enabling even more intelligent and adaptive solutions for complex manufacturing challenges.
