Making money with machine vision

Here’s another interesting application story from Control Engineering, and yes, that is fast becoming my favorite place for vision stories because they provide a lot of detail.

“Vision system cuts downtime, improves inspection productivity 60%” (May 27^th, 2011,) describes a Cognex Checker application at the Royal Canadian Mint. What’s good about the article is that it gives details of the algorithm used to detect spacers between stacks of pennies. Interestingly enough, the machine builder admits that the Checker isn’t actually very good at measuring the length of the stacks, which is because most of the Checkers are pretty low-res. (Cognex is awful coy about just how many pixels there are in the Checkers.)

In this case the lack of resolution wasn’t an issue, but I can’t help feeling that had I been doing the job I’d have stepped up to the InSight. This would have added precision on the length measurement, and provided a little spare capacity for when someone says, “Could we get the vision system to …”