Vision systems speed fuel-injection inspection

Motor industry subcontractor Dinalot has integrated In-Sight 1000 vision systems into a high-speed fuel-injection production line.

Motor industry subcontractor Dinalot has integrated In-Sight 1000 vision systems into a high-speed fuel-injection production line.

Dinalot, a Spanish company, constructs small metallic machine parts for the motor industry.

The parts to be inspected are machined metal disks featuring six tapped and countersunk holes.

Dinalot manufactures five different versions of these parts.

The checks made by the Cognex machine vision system include measuring the diameter of the holes and also their position with respect to each of other and relative to a central positioning notch.

All these checks were previously carried out manually by an operator and because of the high degree of precision required, the measurements used to take a long time.

The checking itself, which involved selective sampling, had the disadvantage of letting through many noncompliant parts.

After studying the production conditions, Ikusmen Vision Artificial, a Cognex integrator partner, put in place a solution that was capable of carrying out the necessary measurements and checks on all manufactured parts whilst at the same time satisfying the key precision, production speed and cost requirements.

The system comprises two Cognex In-Sight 1000 vision sensors, an x-y Cartesian robot and a rack-mounted industrial PC.

The PC is used to control the vision sensors and the robot, and to display the current vision inspection image and the measurement results.

It is also used at the application tuning stage to configure the two sensors and to indicate which version of the product is to be checked.

The In-Sight sensors are mounted on a robot arm.

The first In-Sight sensor, mounted vertically above the parts to be inspected, is used to check the position and diameter of the holes.

The second In-Sight sensor, mounted at a specific angle, looks inside the holes to check the threading.

The horizontal control surface is fitted with LED backlighting also manufactured by Cognex.

The parts arrive at the inspection station after passing through a cleaning bath.

The robot picks up the part to be inspected and places it on the control surface.

The first In-Sight sensor initially locates the central notch on the part and then calculates its position.

Next, the robot moves the camera so that it is above the nominal position of each hole.

The vision sensor then calculates the angle of each hole relative to the central notch and measures their diameters.

All these measurements are carried out to a level of precision of +/-0.02mm for the diameters and +/-0.1 degrees for the angles.

The second In-Sight sensor is then positioned by the robot so that it can inspect the inside of each hole and measure the number of threads and the width of the grooves, thereby checking the quality of the threading.

Once these checks are complete, the robot places good parts on a stacking device and the failed parts in a discard container.

The entire operation takes only 9s, which means that every part produced by Dinalot can be inspected even for all five different production models.

It also ensures that no faulty parts will ever find their way to the end customer.

Thanks to the Ikusmen solution, it has also been possible to automate the "palletisation" of the manufactured parts.

The vision system data obtained during the control process have also allowed Dinalot to refine its machining process.

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