Speedy monitoring of pharmaceutical containers

A packaging contractor for the pharmaceutical industry discovered that manual counting of incoming glass anaesthesia vials was not only slow but also unreliable, so looked to automate the process.

A leading packaging contractor for the pharmaceutical industry discovered that manual counting of incoming glass anaesthesia vials was not only slow but also unreliable, so looked to automate the process.

US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines make it necessary for all companies to track pharmaceutical containers.

Puerto Rock-based systems integrator Colon Industrial, was asked to evaluate a number machine vision solutions.

The company selected and installed an In-Sight vision sensor from Cognex that has eliminated the company's manual counting errors.

"Firstly, In-Sight provided a low-cost solution, which was an important consideration to the customer.

Also, the system was much faster and reliable than manual counting and could accommodate the need for on-the-fly product changeovers", says Neftali Diaz, the Colon Industrial engineer assigned to the project.

The need to perform such changeovers is due to the pharmaceutical company having three different vial sizes: 2, 5 and 10cm3.

For this application Colon Industrial mounted the vision camera on a bracket above the filled and capped vials.

A captured image of the entire array of vials on 15 x 22in trays was made using the individual caps as reference points.

This is done with just a push of a button on the handheld control pad.

A combination of high frequency linear lighting and green and red light filters are used to create contrast on the vial caps, which are different colours depending on the dosage.

Using a captured image the In-Sight vision processor anlayses and counts anything up to 456 vials in 2cm3 trays and up to 196 vials in 5 and 10cm3 trays.

Within the capping station a pneumatic system places the vials in rows of 10.

Trays are designed to hold specified numbers of vials but amounts still vary.

It is necessary therefore to carefully monitor the number of vials at this point.

Once the vials have been counted (which takes approximately 500ms per tray) the tray is removed from the inspection station and a new one is loaded.

"If they're going from a 2cm3 tray to a 5 or 10cm3 tray, a supervisor can simply go on and, using a drop-down menu in the In-Sight interface, click on the type of tray to be counted", Diaz says.

The application program is very similar to a common spreadsheet program, making it easy to create a customised graphical user interface to provide a real-time readout of the number of vials in a tray, the number of trays counted and a running total of the number of vials in the lot.

In-Sight's object location tool, PatFind, handles the variations in part positions caused by moving vials or the trays being in slightly different positions.

Since Colon installed the In-Sight system, it has been counting the vials 24 hours a day with no problems.

The machine vision solution has eliminated manual counting errors and had enabled the packaging company to do precise accounting of the vials and keep to the FDA guidelines.

Additionally, because an entire tray can be counted in 500ms, the company has been able to increase its output of the anaesthesia as slow, manual counting no longer creates a bottleneck.

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