Vision inspection system for household appliance panel.
Name of application: Inspection of print and inclusions on household appliance panels. Visual inspection area:
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control of inclusions (from 0.1 mm) on the panel material and in the display window,
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control of printing errors (pad printing) - defects, faded print, smudged printing, inconsistent printing, wrong printing position.
The creation of an application for the control of overprint on pad-printed household appliance panels is a challenge due to the huge number of different references and the small size of typical defects (inclusions, faded print) - detection of defects of >=0.1 mm is often required. Therefore, at the hardware layer, it is necessary to configure the camera, optics and lighting in such a way that the resulting images are evenly illuminated across the entire (often irregular) panel surface.
At the software layer, on the other hand, it is important to create a suitable development environment that allows the user to intuitively add new references without the need for lengthy programming. Panels are created in many versions, both in terms of content and layout (different hardware functions) and language (multiple versions of the same panel in different languages).
The presented inspection application for household appliance panels consists of several steps: the first task of the system is to read the QR code present on the panel and load the corresponding software (reference). Next, the unique code of the cart is read from the RFID cube on the assembly trolley, to which a photo and the inspection results will be assigned. The next step is to scan the panel (take a picture) with a line camera (this project uses a DATALOGIC M565 camera with 4096 px in-line resolution) - the triggering of the picture is triggered by an optical sensor, while the signal for triggering subsequent lines is taken from an encoder.
An inspection is performed on the image acquired in this way, and the data is stored in a buffer and assigned to an RFID code.
When the forklift enters the operator's station, the forklift code is once again read and the relevant data is retrieved and displayed from the buffer. The operator is informed of the inspection results and defect information is displayed and marked on the operator panel. When the barcode sticker is printed, it is read by the reader, and a report containing all the data and inspection results is saved.
Both the programming environment and the operator panel are in Polish, which makes it much easier to use the application. It is also possible to select a different language version.
