Machine vision system inspects automobile door handles

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• published: 05 Jun 2014
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Machine vision provides the guarantee that automotive components are at the right quality build and reduces customer returns to zero. Industrial Vision Systems Ltd (IVS) http://www.industrialvision.co.uk have built a vision inspection machine to automatically visually check automobile door handles. The manufacturer required a vision system machine to perform a number of inspection tasks as part of the final automatic quality control of the product. An automotive handle is made up of a number of constituent parts including the main body of the handle, a buffer insert and a clip -- all these parts are critical to the effective operation of the handle in the application. Add to this the number of colour variants of each handle available along with the variations in 2 door/4 door left hand/right hand which go up to make a complete car handle pack; and it can be seen that the final inspection is critical to guarantee the correct components reach the customer. In the design of its vision system, IVS chose a standard conveyor system which was built into a custom designed framework. The design of the machine had to take in account the loading and unloading by operators along with all the required tooling and fixtures for holding the vision system components and associated LED line lighting. The machine vision system was required to check for a number of key criteria: 1. The correct combination of parts is present in terms of left hand/right hand handles, and locking/non locking parts as required. 2. Check of the individual components of the handle to confirm they are seated correctly in the handle and have not deviated out of position, including the handle buffer and clip. 3. Check of the correct type against the manifest sheet. 4. Check the positioning of the parts within the customers box before final delivery. The vision inspection area was purposely designed to stop the ingress of ambient light; therefore lighting levels could be controlled by automatic switching of the machine vision lighting arrays as required. Six digital machine vision cameras were mounted into the canopy over the conveyor - five medium resolution digital cameras and one high resolution digital camera. The medium resolution cameras were used for the general inspection processes including the overall correct presence of the handle and deviations of sub components within the handles -- whilst the high resolution camera was used for label inspection and reading of the bar code relating to the manifest sheets. The vision inspection machine offers a robust method for automatic final inspection of every automobile handle leaving the factory thus guaranteeing the quality for the manufacturer. Every box is logged against the factory information system so an historical database of information relating to quality and on-going statistical process control has been gained. Ultimately the Tier 1 manufacturer can offer a cast iron guarantee of the quality of products leaving the factory to their customer by utilising machine vision inspection. For information on complete machine vision special purpose machines built by IVS see: http://www.industrialvision.co.uk/vision-solutions/special-purpose-vision-machines