Under the background of industry 4.0 era centering smart manufacturing, with the deepening of the China Manufacturing 2025 Strategy, the market of industrial intelligent robot industry has shown an explosive growth momentum, and machine vision that plays as role of the "eye-catcher" for industrial robots has made undeniable contributions. Then how does machine vision give industrial robots a pair of “eyes” that can help industrial robots stride on the development road of industrial automation and intelligent industry 4.0 in the future?

Why industrial robots need a pair of "eyes"

Artificial intelligence, as the core technology of industrial robots, has been in a period of continuous rapid development in the last few years. Many robots have already possessed a very high level of intelligence, but still far fall short of the level of intelligence that humans envision. Rome can''''t be built in a day, and robots can''''t be smart at once.

Machine vision

The realization of industry automation requires highly intelligent industrial robots to replace part of human work. Obviously, to make robots replace human force, the first thing to do is to make them “see”. Industrial robots may judge things well only if they have the ability to observe things, so as to be smart and flexible to solve some problems on their own. Therefore, naturally it is fairly important to replace human eyes with machine vision for measuring and judging. The machine vision system can convert captured targets into an image signal through a machine vision product, i.e. an image capture device, and transmit it to a dedicated image processing system to obtain the morphological information of the target. According to pixel distribution, brightness, color, and other information, the image signal is transformed into a digital signal, and then the image system performs various operations on these signals to extract the characteristics of the target, and then controls the on-site equipment actions according to the discrimination results.  

How machine vision works in industrial applications

The machine vision industry has a wide range of applications and mainly has four functions: 1. Guidance and positioning; visual positioning requires the machine vision system to quickly and accurately find the part under test and confirm its location. The machine vision is used for positioning when loading and unloading and for guiding the robot arm to accurately grasp. In the field of semiconductor packaging, devices need to adjust the pickup head according to the position information of the chip obtained by machine vision, accurately pick up and bind the chip. This is the most fundamental application of visual positioning in the machine vision industry. 2. Appearance test: Check whether there is any quality problem on the product line and it is also the link with the most replacement of human force. Machine vision mainly involves the medical field for dimensional inspection, bottle appearance defect detection, bottle shoulder defect detection, and bottleneck inspection, etc. 3. High-precision testing: Some products have high precision, reaching 0.01 ~ 0.02m even up to u-level. They cannot be observed by human eyes, and must be detected with machine. 4. Recognition means that the machine vision is used to process, analyze and understand images to identify various patterns of objects and targets, allowing data traceability and collection. It is widely used in the automotive parts, food, medicine and other applications.

In summary, the feature of machine vision system is to improve the flexibility and automation of production, and is mainly used to replace artificial vision in the dangerous working environments that are not suitable for manual work or in situations where artificial vision is difficult to meet the requirements. In addition, in the process of large-scale industrial production, it is inefficient and inaccurate to check the product quality using artificial vision, while machine vision inspection methods can greatly improve the production efficiency and the degree of automation of production. Moreover, machine vision is easy to implement information integration and is the fundamental technology for achieving computer integrated manufacturing.

The rapid development of Chinese industrial robot industry has shocked the world. The demand for industrial upgrading from manufacturing to smart manufacturing, the large scale of manufacturing market, the promotion of the China Manufacturing 2025 Strategy, and the numerous industrial layouts have created the “best of all time” for the development of industrial robots. Manufacturing masters are competing to lay out a smart factory, and it can be said that the robot industry has a great potential of rising. The demand scale of the entire manufacturing industry should not be underestimated, and the development of the industrial robot industry will certainly provide lots of opportunities for machine vision applications.

Source: China Automation Network (www.coaoo.com)