Heilbronn, Germany — The Israeli-German firm Inspekto says it has overcome several inspection challenges for injection molders with its new autonomous machine vision system.
The Inspekto S70 system is a new approach to quality assurance that can inspect more than one product at a time thanks to self-adjusting and self-learning capabilities, according to a news release from the company, which has its U.S. headquarters in Detroit.
While traditional machine vision solutions inspect only one item at a specific point on the production line, the company says the Inspekto 570 system has an app called Types that is able to inspect tens or even hundreds of different products at the same location on the line.
Inspekto says the technology is autonomous in every way, including how it determines the ideal number of samples it needs to learn the item's characteristics and how it self-adjusts the camera settings to obtain the best image during the inspection.
The technology also addresses problems related to correctly lighting the parts to be inspected. Injection molds usually have smooth, highly reflective surfaces that resemble mirrors. Or, they can be the same color of the polymer, or appear that way because of a lack of contrast due to insufficient illumination of the inside of the mold.
Inspekto says its system is designed to self-adjust the camera parameters to obtain perfect lighting, focus and contrast. The company says the plastic parts can be illuminated in a way that clearly differentiates one from the other, allowing the system to perform effective visual quality assurance autonomously.
Production line engineers with no previous knowledge of machine vision or artificial intelligence can set up the system to work in hours, rather than weeks and months with the aid of a systems integrator, Inspekto says.
Inspekto is based in Tel Aviv and has a European demonstration center in Heilbronn. For more information, go to www.inspekto.com.