Application Analysis of Machine Vision in Manufacturing Industry

Machine learning has many applications, whether processing social media traffic or trying to surface actionable insights or consumer targeting based on past purchases.

1. Predictive maintenance of industrial machine vision

Businesses that rely on physical components to manufacture products or help deliver services often require maintenance on machinery or equipment, or in worst-case scenarios, machines can break or components can fail, halting production or stalling products.

Predictive maintenance refers to the process of using machine learning and IoT devices to monitor machines and components (often using sensors) to collect data points and identify signals or take corrective action before an asset or component fails.

Just imagine that just one minute of downtime at a car factory can cost as much as $20,000 in high-margin cars. Leveraging industrial vision technology can help businesses stay ahead.

2. Packaging inspection of industrial machine vision

Counting pills or capsules before they are placed in containers is critical for pharmaceutical companies. To solve this problem, a UK-based company has developed a solution that can be deployed on existing production lines or even run as a standalone unit.

A key feature of the solution is the use of computer vision to inspect broken or partially formed pharmaceuticals. As the medicines go through the production line, images are captured by cameras and transmitted to a dedicated PC, where software is used to process the images to run further analysis to check that the medicines are correct in color, length, width and overall.

A PC based industrial machine vision inspection system can also be used to perform the counting function, if the drug product is deemed defective, this information is recorded, then a signal is sent to the counting function and when the container bottle arrives at the end of the production line, there are defective pieces The container of the dose will be rejected, thus eliminating the possibility of defective tablets.

3. Industrial machine vision to read barcodes

Reading, identifying, and processing hundreds of thousands of barcodes every day is no small feat, and simply cannot be done manually at scale.

For example, cell phones and mobile devices require ever smaller printed circuit boards (or PCBs). As manufacturers are forced to produce more PCBs for the growing technology market, they are turning to a fabrication process known as "paneling." In this process many identical circuit boards are printed onto a large panel and then each circuit is separated by machine for final testing in order to check these boards, as the barcode is the unique identification of each circuit present on the PCN board To facilitate the inspection of these boards, a machine vision based solution called PanelScan was developed to read the barcodes on PCN boards.

Previously, this task could be accomplished by using a handheld barcode scanner, but it was time-consuming and prone to human error. By implementing industrial machine vision based solutions, PCB manufacturers can save significant business costs.