Running Optimal Quality Inspection Autonomously with the Help of AI
Manufacturers must invest in expensive, cumbersome, complex, and time-consuming solutions to reduce the risk of defective products. To compound the complexity, manufacturers often cannot independently install these products without a systems integrator delivering a project tailored to the product and location at hand. This means the manufacturer loses control of its Quality Assurance (QA) and is at the mercy of the systems integrator. If anything on the production line changes, the manufacturer must rely on the integrator for ongoing support, increasing cost and time.
Many companies spend too much time maintaining their visual inspection systems to mitigate production or supply chain-related changes when it comes to traditional machine vision solutions.
Enter Inspekto.
Inspekto has launched a new software version of its INSPEKTO S70, the only Autonomous Machine Vision system on the market. The INSPEKTO S70 offers smart features such as a recommendations center that guides users in creating and maintaining inspection profiles over time, improving usability, versatility, process integration, and inspection accuracy. The INSPEKTO S70 enables manufacturers to focus on agile manufacturing and process automation while optimal quality inspection runs autonomously.
Users must create a data file with the inspection characteristics when setting up a machine vision system to inspect a new product. This is known as an inspection profile.
The INSPEKTO S70 guides users in creating new inspection profiles with no machine vision expertise, making the process extremely intuitive. This allows manufacturers to achieve quality inspection independence and ensure that their teams can perform quality control of their ever-changing production lines quickly and easily.
The INSPEKTO S70 now incorporates a new Profile Center to help users quickly improve and optimize profiles over time. This is a set of smart tools that guide users when adjusting a profile to reach the desired performance level and ensure it is continuously adapting to mitigate changes in the production process and environments, such as tooling change, sub-component replacement, or lighting variations. The Profile Center also allows users to continuously compare previous and new profiles for the same item to improve the inspection performance. Since it is built for change and adapts to the needs of the production line, INSPEKTO S70 serves as a long-term QA solution that accompanies the manufacturer through different stages of the production process.
To ensure continuous inspection performance throughout the life cycle of the inspected part or product, users benefit from autonomously generated, AI-based active recommendations to adapt the profile to production changes, either process- or environment-related. This is an unprecedented capability offered by no other visual inspection system, including AI-based ones.
This reduces false alarms for NOK products and wrongly OK products. Adding samples to the profile is immediate and results in a profile optimized for the specific part being produced. This optimization does not require additional software or expert intervention and can be done as the production line changes or evolves.
In addition, the user can define unlimited regions of interest (ROIs) within the part and adjust the size and sensitivity thresholds independently for each. In this way, the system can be easily customized to the requirements of each use case and the nuances of each part, allowing for unprecedented accuracy.
The new software also improves the S70’s ability to inspect highly reflective objects — a common challenge in industrial QA — regardless of whether the checked item is stationary or moving. The system now incorporates anti-reflection technology that can be applied to moving and stationary objects.
“Our customers point out that with traditional machine vision solutions, most of their time is spent maintaining existing visual inspection systems to mitigate production or supply chain-related changes,” explained Bernd Schumacher, Global CEO of Inspekto. “This happens because production lines are dynamic and go through many changes, from environmental factors like light hours to changes in the supplied raw materials or components.
“Currently, every time a company chooses a new supplier for a component, this disrupts the inspection set up, and a machine vision expert must reprogram the software. The new version of our software eliminates these challenges, allowing the plant personnel to ensure the profile’s continuous performance to achieve top-notch inspection, without relying on external experts.”
“Several of Inspekto’s leading customers are already using the new solution and are impressed with its performance,” said Ofer Nir, VP of Product & Marketing at Inspekto. “We are hoping to extend it to all of our global customers to help them keep up with the unprecedented demand for flexibility in manufacturing.”
For more information on the latest version of the INSPEKTO S70 and to schedule a free private demonstration, contact the Inspekto team at www.inspekto.com.
