Applications

20 ton steel coils were being slit, controlled by an old vision system with no spare parts available. We developed an improved system using Cognex cameras.

Some of the improvements achieved:

• Lighting is positioned so that debris does not collect on it, and threaten guidance reliability.
• Elimination of maintenance difficulties due to old analog design.
• Faster response for better slitter guidance.
• Intuitive HMI for referral by operators.

Four Sick Ranger 3D cameras were used to guide eight robots, with programming being done in MVTec Halcon. The system inspects the dimensions and appearance of multiple different bread products, before guiding the robots to pick them off the moving conveyor.

As they pass on a conveyor, these bottles are inspected from multiple angles to detect holes, thin patches, flash, dark specks, and general malformation.

A robot cell automatically performs finishing operations on many different types of wheels after casting, and it needs to know exactly which wheel is being presented each time because they are non-sequential. This vision system identifies each wheel based on spoke appearance, stud hole configuration and overall dimensions, which enables the robots to perform the right operations for each wheel.

These wedges clamp on cables used in bridges and other structures, allowing tension to be applied. A simple but effective inspection system saved costly manual inspection of such a critical part.

Eight 4k line-scan cameras, special lighting and the Halcon inspection library were used to develop this system, which continuously inspects for defects as small as 150 micron, on a shiny and uneven surface 2.4m wide.

This system sits above a carton packer, and checks each one for completeness and presentation. Many different configurations are inspected, using brightness, colour and pattern matching tools to verify that the correct number of products are present and arranged properly.

Preventing Train Derailments

This application won the US Advanced Imaging Magazine’s Application of the year award.

Installation at Leigh Creek Mine in South Australia.
The purpose – to eliminate derailments due to coal release in transit.
The method – a gap between two components indicated whether the coal doors were securely closed. This gap was measured on each coal truck on a three kilometre train as they passed the cameras at 25 Kph. An alarm signal was output if these measurements were greater than 10 mm.

For fifteen years, apart from maintaining cleanliness, these cameras required only two services – one for a physical impact and the other for a subtle vision program improvement – and for those fifteen years no derailments occurred.

VSE are proud of the operation of this application, and although we are now using far more sophisticated systems, we are confident that these too will stand the test of time.