Vision system checks automotive parts

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Mar 20, 2007

Alema vision systems cope with difficult conditions to provide reliable reading to automotive part manufacturer Borg Warner

Being one of the biggest makers and suppliers of automotive parts, Borg Warner cannot afford to make mistakes.

The company needed to guarantee the quality of a new high added value component and to be able to trace the product from cradle to grave.

They decided to turn to Cognex whose vision systems already figure on many of their production lines and machines.

The resulting project was directed by Alema Automation, a Cognex Partner System Integrator (PSI) for the south west of France.

Each piece needs to be marked, the precision and quality of the marking needs to be verified.

Finally, it needs to be confirmed that each piece has gone through the necessary quality and safety controls before being delivered.

The solution was VisionPro from Cognex along with the In-Sight 5110, Cognex Partner Product ESO'CR from Esox, as well as micro percussion marking machines from Technifor.

Once off the production line each piece is marked with micro percussion: two lines of alphanumerical characters indicating the product reference, the batch number, the team identity and the manufacturing date.

Following this, a first vision station consisting of an 8500 card and VisionPro, reads the characters.

The information is then transferred to a Technifor engraver who converts them to Datamatrix and this code is marked on the other side of the piece.

"The ESO'CR software has proved to be of added value to the automobile industry".

"It has allowed us to stay within our budget and our time frame" explained Olivier Skalinski, project leader at Alema.

In order to avoid any error and to guarantee the staying power of the marking, an In-Sight 5110, installed beside the micro percussion machine, verifies the content and the quality of the marking.

Once marked, the piece then undergoes a series of hydraulic testing with eight points of inspection.

Once out of the testing phase, the piece then passes to a second In-Sight 5110 vision station where it needs to be established that the piece has successfully undergone all the necessary tests.

The pieces that arrive at the second vision post may be dry and clean or they may still be oily from the testing process.

Despite the fact that the lighting and legibility conditions are completely different to those of the first reading station, the In-Sight 5110 is perfectly capable of reading the code on each piece without any extra configuration.

Alema was also obliged to take up another challenge: ensuring that the In-Sight can communicate with the factory database containing the results of the testing phase.

Alema developed a interface with this in mind, enabling In-Sight to deliver a verdict for each piece.

Faulty pieces which are reparable are sent back to be fixed while the pieces that have been successfully checked and verified are directed to the packaging zone.

For maximum security, Alema has installed a third In-Sight 5110 system at the entrance to the packaging area, which performs a final check and verification of the piece.

Alema took two days to confirm that the system worked correctly on prototype pieces, then one week to install at the factory site, including personnel training in use and maintenance.

The robustness of the In-Sight vision systems allowed for the same material to be used on different work posts and also allowed Borg Warner to greatly reduce the amount of spare part stock kept at hand.

Another benefit was the commitment of Alema Automation to the project in its entirety, thus avoiding any conflicts of interest between different suppliers.

"Thanks to the comprehensive nature of the Cognex solution and to their partner network, we have a high-performance, cost-effective solution at our disposal" concluded Stephane Laval at Borg Warner.

Following the success of this solution, Borg Warner aims to adapt other production lines and deploy the same solution in order to optimise this traceability throughout its production processes.