Yet another interesting vision article from Control Engineering. This one relates to the challenges of short-run, frequent changeover manufacturing, which is a topic I believe gets insufficient attention.
Magazines are full of stories about high volume, product specific automation but unfortunately that’s not the world many of us live in. Our real world requires relatively short runs, hours or maybe days, followed by changing over to make a different product. In this kind of environment it’s essential to minimize both the non-productive time and the process variability or instability that often accompanies a changeover.
“Vision-Guided Robots Automate Vial, Syringe Filling”, (Control Engineering, October 4th, 2010) relates how machine vision is being used to provide flexibility in a pharmaceutical application. This allows rapid changeover, so minimizing both downtime and capital expenditure and the ideas can be applied in many manufacturing situations.
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