Vision

Designed a machine to load a milling machine and inspect finished parts. We used a telecentric lens on an inspection camera to measure the milled shape and critical dimensions. These had to be within 0.0006 inches of the target value. If parts were out of tolerance, the camera would notify the robot to reject them.

If too many rejects happened, the machine would stop. We were able to run entire lots of several hundred parts this way without operator intervention. Sometimes slight intervention was required if heat buildup caused milling inaccuracy, but the error would be caught by the camera, thereby limiting scrap.

The machine could consistently run two to four hours at a time unattended. Vision systems are also critically important for locating parts in high-mix, low-volume applications, where we must programmatically locate one of a variety of part numbers depending on an operator-selected recipe. Because of this, they are a standard feature in many of our automation projects.