I recently responded to a service call. The complaint was that the machine vision systems were no longer correctly doing the desired inspection, were missing detectable defects, and were creating a high number of false rejects. Sound familiar?
I was intrigued that the customer wanted us to not only fix their existing vision systems, but also wanted “recommendations for getting in some better equipment”. The equipment was only 4 or 5 years old, but the customer had been to a recent trade show and had heard that machine vision technology was changing so quickly that new components would certainly solve the problem.
Ultimately, I learned that the parts being inspected had changed. Features which had been opaque were now translucent, geometric sizes of other features were different from original. We made some adjustments to inspection algorithms, added some image processing/filtering as appropriate, and the systems were quickly operational again with no false accepts and minimal (< 0.01%) false reject rates. We took some extra time to provide some enhancement to the operator interface which made machine maintenance easier for the customer.
Sounds like a nice success story, but…for me the service call’s not the real story here. There are so many critical “sub-plots” to this story that I barely know where to begin. However, there are two important “back stories” I’ll cover in the next couple of posts.
David…
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