As the automotive industry introduces more options to meet the growing complexities and demands of its customers (such as increased variety of trim options) it has rendered challenges to the automotive manufacturing industry.
Demands of the market filter directly back to the manufacturing floor of tier suppliers as they must find the means to fulfill the market requirements on a flexible industrial network, either new or existing. The success of their customers is dependent on the tier supplier chain delivering within a tight timeline. Whereby, if pressure is applied upon that ecosystem, it will mean a more difficult task to meet the JIT (just in time) supply requirements resulting in increased operating costs and potential penalties.
Meeting customer requirements creates operational challenges including lost production time due to product varieties and tool change time increases. Finding ways to simplify tool change and validate the correct components are placed in the correct assembly or module to optimize production is now an industry priority. In addition, tracking and traceability is playing a strong role in ensuring the correct manufacturing process has been followed and implemented.
How can manufacturing implement highly flexible inspection capabilities while allowing direct communication to the process control network and/or MES network that will allow the capability to change inspection characteristics on the fly for different product inspection on common tooling?
Smart Vision Inspection Systems
Compact Smart Vision Inspection System technology has evolved a long way from the temperamental technologies of only a decade ago. Systems offered today have much more robust and simplistic intuitive software tools embedded directly in the Smart Vision inspection device. These effective programming cockpit tools allow ease of use to the end user at the plant providing the capability to execute fast reliable solutions with proven algorithm tools. Multi-network protocols such as EthernetIP, ProfiNet, TCP-IP-LAN (Gigabit Ethernet) and IO-LINK have now come to realization. Having multiple network capabilities delivers the opportunity of not just communicating the inspection result to the programmable logic controller (via process network) but also the ability to send image data independent of the process network via the Gigabit Ethernet network to the cloud or MES system. The ability to over-lay relevant information onto the image such as VIN, Lot Code, Date Code etc. is now achievable. In addition, camera housings have become more industrially robust such as having aluminum housings with an ingress protection rating of IP67.
Industrial image processing is now a fixture within todays’ manufacturing process and is only growing. The technology can now bring your company a step closer to enabling IIOT by bringing issues to your attention before they create down time (predictive maintenance). They aid in reaching operational excellence as they uncover processing errors, reduce or eliminate scrap and provide meaningful feedback to allow corrective actions to be implemented.
