Wearing
my “Lean manufacturing” hat, I’d argue that machine vision is
little more than a Band-Aid. It patches problems rather than going to
root causes and eliminating them. However, in the real world that
most of us inhabit, sometimes patching is all you can do. But as with
any problem solving, the quality of the outcome is directly related
to how well you define what you need to do.
That’s
a point made by Greg Hollows of Edmund Optics in “Integrating
a Vision System”
published in Assembly magazine, September 2013. This intelligent
article covers many of the issues that should addressed, and
especially the importance of defining requirements. It’s really
important that you take the time to do this thoroughly.
One
point I’ve seen trip up many vision system installations is
long-run part variation. It’s all very well specifying and
configuring your system to work with a certain set of products, but
many materials exhibit batch-to-batch variation that is often not
considered. As Hollows notes in his article, “Changes to the
materials used to make the parts can wreak havoc on a vision system’s
ability to perform after the changeover.”
There’s
no such thing as an easy vision application; they all have
challenges, so start by defining carefully what it is your system is
supposed to do. Better still, start by reading the article linked
above.
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