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Machine Vision Boosts Assembly Line Quality

Sidney Hill Jr.
Posted: May 19, 2003

You can tell a lot about a Ford pickup truck if you know how to decode the letters and
numbers--which Ford calls the truck's badge--mounted on the front fender panels. For
instance, the F-250 is a 3/4-ton truck and the F-350 is a 1-ton vehicle. The base model
of each is an XL. The XLT version offers some up-graded features, and the XLT Lariat is
what car dealers typically refer to as fully loaded.

But how do you know that the correct badge has been placed on each truck? That's a
question that assembly line workers at Ford's Louisville, KY, plant must ask themselves
several Arial a day. Those workers assemble Ford's Heavy-Duty pickups--the F-250
through F-550. Recently, they have become more confident in their ability to match
badges with vehicles, thanks to the installation of a vision-equipped robot that verifies
that each truck has the correct badge before it leaves the final assembly area.

"There are at least 12 different badges that can go on a truck, and the vehicles all look
pretty much the same when they are coming down the assembly line," says Frank
Maslar, a Ford automation technology specialist. "No manual verification process is
100% effective," he adds. "Studies have shown that when people are asked to sort
black and white ping pong balls by color that they only get that right 85% of the time."

Numbers like that also explain why machine vision systems are becoming common
fixtures in all types of manufacturing facilities. The Automated Imaging Association
(AIA, Ann Arbor, MI) says that worldwide machine vision equipment sales grew by
about 20% in 2000 to $6 billion, with roughly 34% of those purchases made by North
American companies.

Jeffrey Burnstein, AIA executive director, says that sales were slow during the first half
of 2001. He believes the slowdown is temporary, and attributes the decrease more to a
general decline in spending on capital equipment than to a decline in demand for vision
systems. In fact, the AIA stands by its projections that worldwide spending on vision
systems will reach $12 billion by 2005.

Reasons for that optimism include technological advances that are making vision
systems less expensive even as they become more powerful. "This is creating
opportunities for the use of machine vision in a wider range of industries," Burnstein
says.

Automakers and their suppliers have long been regular users of machine vision for tasks
ranging from guiding robots for welding and pick-and-place assembly tasks to online
inspection of components and subassemblies. And as Ford's badge-verification system
shows, the auto industry continues to find new uses for this technology. (See "Pickup
Badge Verification at Ford," on p. 52.) But Burnstein and other industry experts say
companies that make semiconductors, medical equipment and other products that use
electronic components are now the driving forces in the vision system market.

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"Many of these companies are finding that machine vision allows them to do things they
simply couldn't do before," says Larry Chin, an executive vice president with Intelligent
Automation Systems (Cambridge, MA), a machine-vision systems integration firm. "We
have clients in the telecommunications industry using machine vision to move optical
fibers a distance of 1 micron or less. You can't do that by hand."

No more bowls
Peterson Manufacturing (Kansas City, MO), which makes lights for tractor-trailers and
emergency vehicles, is able to do without some expensive factory equipment by using a
vision-equipped robot to load components onto its assembly lines. The robot, which
Peterson purchased from Seiko Instruments (Torrance, CA), picks up parts from a bin
and shows them to the vision system, which determines whether the parts are facing
the right direction for placement on the assembly line. If the part is not facing the right
direction, the vision system tells the robot which way to turn it before placing it on a
conveyor belt leading to the assembly line. "This eliminates the need to have bowl
feeders, which are expensive pieces of equipment designed for handling specific
components," says Steven Ham, Peterson Manufacturing's plant manager.

Philips Oral Health Care (Snoqualmie, WA), manufacturer of the Sonicare electric
toothbrush, uses Seiko's vision-equipped robots in half of the dozen steps involved in
assembling the 50,000 brush heads it builds daily. The vision systems handle tasks
ranging from ensuring that parts are turned the right way for insertion into a production
machine to checking that specific components have been inserted as the brush heads
move along the assembly line. The makeup of the brush head--a 5-inch long package of
wires, microchips and magnets--would make this tedious work for a human.

"Some of these processes previously were not done at all," says Devin Nelson, a Philips
automation engineer. "Others were prone to problems because they were being done
manually, and people are subject to fatigue. We installed the vision systems because we
needed repeatability in those processes."

Three tasks
In general, machine vision systems are used in assembly for three types of tasks--
guidance, inspection and process verification. In a guidance application, the vision
system serves as the eyes for a production machine that has to find a particular part
and place it in a specific location. Examples of this are pick-and-place operations such
as placing electronic components on printed circuit boards.

Inspection operations, which typically take place at the end of an assembly process,
consist of using machine vision to scan for defects. Process verification involves making
sure that a particular step, such as the insertion of a component, has been performed
before a product moves to the next production step.

Machine vision is based on the same technology that is used in optical character readers
or the scanners that convert paper documents into electronic files. The technology
relies on a camera to take a picture of a designated object and then converts that image
into a stream of digital information that can be read by a computer. Machine vision was
born when scientists began connecting these character-reading devices to machine
tools.

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Cognex Corp. (Natick, MA), was a pioneer in the machine vision field. It sold its first
system in the early 1980s to a typewriter manufacturer that used it to check that the
keys on its typewriters were in the correct positions. Today, more than 100 companies
sell various types of machine vision systems. In addition to Cognex, leading vision
system vendors include Coreco Imaging Inc. (Bedford, MA), PPT Vision Inc.
(Minneapolis), and DVT Corp. (Norcross, GA). Robotics manufacturers--including Adept
Technology Inc. (San Jose, CA), Fanuc Robotics (Rochester, MI) and Seiko
Instruments--also have joined the field by integrating vision systems with their robots.

Most contemporary machine vision systems contain the same basic components,
starting with a camera, a light source, a power supply and a personal computer. Unless
the system employs a digital camera, the PC must have a special board called a frame
grabber.

The frame grabber converts the images captured by the camera to digital signals that
can be read by the computer. The other system components include a set of cables to
connect the camera to the power supply and the PC, and software for running the entire
system.

To deploy most vision systems in a manufacturing setting, the PC must be connected to

the machine that performs the process that the vision system will either guide or
monitor, as well as to the plant's local area network (LAN).

Watching the process

Machine vision systems have historically been used for inspection applications, largely
because these were the easiest kind of tasks to set up. But some industry observers
say that is changing.

"The potential uses for machine vision literally are unlimited," says John Little, a director
with Vision 1 (Bozeman, MT), a systems integrator. "But we are seeing a shift away
from using vision systems to check things that are already made. More companies are
now using them to monitor products as they are making them."

The growth of in-process vision applications has coincided with technological advances
that include more user-friendly vision software and the advent of the small, relatively
inexpensive vision systems referred to as smart cameras or vision sensors, which come
with built-in computers.

"Almost all vision software is now Windows-based," says Little. "The solutions have
become more elegant, as the developers like to say. They offer graphical interfaces that
make it easy for users to configure the systems to perform their particular applications
without having to understand the underlying technology."

In the early days of machine vision, almost all systems were custom configured by
system integrators who typically bought standard cameras and computers from regular
retail outlets and modified them to work with a particular manu-facturing process.
These early systems also required custom software programs written by highly skilled
programmers.

Today, Cognex offers software with its In-Sight line of vision sensors that allows users
to configure an application by entering data into a spreadsheet. Fanuc Robotics sells a

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software package called visLOC that makes setting up a vision system much like
installing a software program with a Microsoft Windows wizard. Ford uses this package
to run its badge-verification system. Maslar says it took three days to install this
system, which also employs a Fanuc robot and vision system hardware--specifically a
camera and frame-grabber--from Cognex.

In the past, it could have taken three months or longer to custom-build a similar
system. Most users say the most time-consuming part of implementing contemporary
vision systems is designing the process that you want the system to perform; setting
up and programming the vision system is now the easy part.

Industry sources point out that continuing price declines and the decreased complexity
of today's machine vision systems are making the technology a practical option for a
growing number of assembly line applications. Traditional systems configured from
multiple components with connections to a corporate LAN have declined in cost from
$40,000 or more a decade ago to around $20,000 today. The cost of installing systems
has dropped significantly as well, because it no longer requires modifying hardware and
writing custom software programs.

For some applications, the development of low-cost smart cameras and vision sensors
can lower machine vision costs even further, while giving users more flexibility in the
way they use the technology. These systems, which typically cost about $5,000, can be
placed almost anywhere on a production line. They normally are used for a single task,
such as checking for the presence of a part before a product moves to the next station.

"Placing a few smart cameras at various points in a production line is a cost-effective

way of creating a distributed intelligence system in your plant," says Nello Zeuch,
president of the consulting firm Vision Systems International (Yardley, PA). "The
ultimate value is an overall improvement in quality because you can spot problems as
they are happening, and implement process improvements. For instance, you can
establish a rule that if you see failures in a process, you stop that process and take
some corrective action."

Saint Peter
Currently, most users track the number of failures that their vision systems detect, but
few have gotten to the point of using that information to trigger immediate changes to
their production processes.

"Most companies use vision systems as a 'Saint Peter' device," says Little. "They let the
good parts pass through and they send the bad ones to another place."

In reality, most of parts rejected by vision systems during an assembly operation are
not bad at all. They simply have a component missing or in the wrong position. The
normal remedy is to send the part back to the station where that component is inserted,
where the problem is fixed, and the part is again checked by the vision system.

That is exactly what happens in the Ogden, UT, plant where Autoliv Automotive Safety
Products assembles airbags. Autoliv employs a Cognex vision system to verify that two
key components of the part that inflates the airbag are installed correctly.

Each bag requires two of these parts, called squibs. They look slightly different, and

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they must be inserted in specific chambers inside the bag. Production workers insert the
squibs into their respective chambers. A machine then completes the process by
pressing the squibs into place. But the press cannot do its job until it gets clearance
from the vision system.

The vision system goes into action when a worker flips a switch, sending a signal that
the squibs are in place. The vision system's camera, which is located just above the
assembly line, takes a picture of the squibs and transmits it to the system's computer,
which checks to see if both squibs are present and in the correct chambers. If
everything checks out, the system sends a pass sig-nal to a programmable logic
controller (PLC) connected to the press, and the PLC tells the press to punch the squibs
into place.

Where's that squib?

If a squib is not in place, the vision system tells the PLC not to activate the press. As
this happens, the worker views the process on a monitor. When the system detects a
problem, the problem area is highlighted on the worker's screen. Once the worker
addresses the problem, he or she flips the switch to start the verification process again.

"We previously used pass-through sensors for this type of application, but the vision
system is more accurate," says Jonathan Sommer, an Autoliv process engineer.
Pass-through sensors rely on two pieces of optical fiber that pass light to one another
across an assembly line. As the product being inspected passes the sensor, a break in
the beam of light indicates that the parts the sensor is looking for are present.

"Once a squib is inserted into a chamber, it can move about a sixteenth of an inch
before it is pressed into place," Sommer says. "We had to constantly align the
pass-through sensor to accommodate for that movement. The camera in the Cognex
system can actually track the part as it moves and still capture the correct image."

Marlow Industries, a Dallas-based manufacturer of thermoelectric cooling devices, is

considering expanding its use of machine vision as a means of improving quality
control. Marlow's devices, which consist of two boards containing electronic circuits that
are mated together in precise fashion, control the temperature in a number of products,
from refrigerated picnic boxes to telecommunications networking equipment.

Marlow currently uses vision-equipped Seiko robots to mate its circuit boards. But
Michael Gilley, a production engineer, envisions having vision systems verify every step
in Marlow's manufac-turing process, which would, in effect, mean the return of a 100%
product inspection program.

"The pressure to produce quality products throughout the economy is bringing 100%
inspection back," Gilley says. "With machine vision, we could inspect products
throughout the assembly process. That would mean each product had been 100%
inspected once it reached the end of the line. Then we could have people pull samples
for an end-of-process inspection.

"That would give us the best of both worlds," Gilley concludes. "The sample inspection
would catch some of the subjective quality measures that are beyond a machine's
comprehension. Meanwhile, the machine inspections would allow us to catch problems
early in the process, when they are easier, and less costly, to fix."

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PICKUP BADGE VERIFICATION AT FORD

One of the newest applications of machine vision at Ford Motor Co. is a system used at
Ford's Louisville, KY, plant to verify that the correct identification "badge" is placed on
the fender panels of pickup trucks moving down the assembly line.

The truck badge verification process starts with workers looking at electronic sign
boards that hang above their workcells to identify which truck model and trim
series--the XL, XLT or XLT Lariat--is coming down the line at any given moment. This
information comes from Ford's production management software system, which tracks
each vehicle as it moves through various stages of assembly.

The badges are stored in bins beside the assembly line. When a truck enters the final
assembly area, a red light on top of the bin containing the appropriate badges for that
truck comes on. A worker then retrieves a badge from that bin and places it on the
truck.

The truck then moves to the robotic verification station. As the vehicle enters this
station, a bar code containing information about the truck's configuration is scanned,
and that information is transferred to the software program that workers use to operate
the robot workcell. The cell-control program then instructs the robot to verify that the
truck has the correct badge. To do this, the robot moves the vision system's camera
above the badge. The camera takes a picture of the badge and transfers it to the vision
system's software program, which compares the picture to an already-verified image of
the correct badge that is stored in a database.

If it is not the correct badge, a message is sent to the worker operating the cell. The
worker enters this information into the plant's quality system, and sends the truck back
to the beginning of the final assembly area, where the verification process starts again.
If the truck has the correct badge, the worker releases it from final assembly and enters
that fact into the quality system.

This system was initially installed for a six-month pilot program that involved checking
badges on only one side of the truck. The system is now ready to begin inspecting all
badges on all trucks, says Frank Maslar, a Ford automation technology specialist.

Masler says that the system will save Ford money by eliminating the need to send
trucks back through the line for new badges, but he declines to be specific on the
savings. Suffice it to say, Masler notes, "if it wasn't cost-effective, we wouldn't be doing
it."

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