Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Detecting porosity

If you’re involved in machining cast metal you’ll know what I mean: those little cavities that are revealed only when you cut metal. They can result in a bore not sealing, or in premature part failure, so it’s pretty important to find them before shipping or assembling the machined part. In many factories this detection work is done by a small army of motherly women (why are they always women?) sitting at the end of the machining lines.

Well bad news ladies! Valentine Robotics, a distributor and integrator of the Scorpion Vision software package, have come up with a machine vision method of detecting porosity. This posting on the Scorpion Vision blog gives some details (nothing on the lighting though, which is a pity.) To be perfectly honest, from the pictures provided the image processing task doesn’t look that hard. I feel sure a smart camera could have done the job. On the other hand, a base version of Scorpion is pretty inexpensive.

If you want to know more about Valentine, here’s a link to their web site: www.valentinerobotics.com

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can also run the Scorpion in Sony Smart Camera.

Anonymous said...

The problem with Scorpian is that as an integrator, I would have to buy it from Valentine, another integrator, who is my competition.

Anonymous said...

You can buy it from any distributor - not necessarily in N. America. Remember, it's only a license key that you need.