Using Smart Cameras for Closed-Loop Control
Posted by Steve Maves on Tue, Nov 09, 2010 @ 12:06 PM
Vision savvy customers have been using measurement results to “close the loop” with their motion controllers and robots for years. Closed loop control can lower the amount of waste, speed up production, and enable manufacturing processes to run at higher tolerances than are possible with hard fixturing. Let’s discuss a few examples.
For continuous web manufacturing processes, vision-based web guiding can control web movement and steering to tighter tolerances than other methods. This precision allows manufacturers to use more of the web. The outside edges of a web are typically cut off and discarded, if less material is discarded, significant savings can be realized.
For many manufacturing processes, the speed of the process has a large effect on the overall accuracy of the product. When smart cameras are used to measure 100% of the output of a manufacturing process, they can be used to speed up the manufacturing process automatically, increasing throughput. This removes subjective judgments about “how the machine is running” and bases machine speed on actual machine performance.
Smart cameras can also enable tighter tolerances than are possible with hard fixturing. For some manufacturing processes that involve multiple steps and/or multiple components, the tolerance stackup from these error sources can lead to large part-to-part variation. Smart cameras can alleviate this problem by directly imaging the part and then feeding the result (with only one error source – the resolution of the camera) directly to the next step of the process.
These are a few examples of how Closed Loop Control can save money on the factory floor and there are many more. Please contact a PPT VISION application engineer if you have any questions about how Machine Vision can save you money on your factory floor.
