Smart cameras for smart engineers

Plant engineers face a variety of challenges: improving quality; increasing efficiency; managing costs; reducing scrap; reducing downtime; and boosting capacity.

Plant engineers face a variety of challenges: improving quality; increasing efficiency; managing costs; reducing scrap; reducing downtime; and boosting capacity.

The latest machine vision technology products, or "smart cameras", can provide a solution to all these problems in a single box.

Machine vision is an electronic alternative to human or manual inspection that helps companies increase productivity and benefit their bottom line by identifying and eliminating defective products.

Machine vision technology, which is rapidly growing in factory applications, involves a camera taking a digital image of a designated object that can be read by a computer.

In essence, it replaces the human eye with 100% accuracy, 100% of the time.

"Smart camera" refers to the latest innovation in machine vision.

The smart camera, whose advent was in the early 1990s, is much more than just a camera.

True, it is a digital camera, small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, but it comes with tremendous high tech horsepower in the form of an onboard computer processor and a CCD that captures digital images at the smallest unit: a pixel.

The top line of smart cameras can measure down to a tenth of a pixel with total reliability and far smaller than that with varying degrees of reliability.

Smart cameras can take precise measurements, sort by miniscule colour variations, sort by object shape, and perform optical character recognition (OCR), barcode recognition and a number of other tasks - all at speeds that easily outpace most assembly line inspection rates.

Today's plant engineer job functions are fraught with challenges that - with the proper tools and handling - can turn into opportunities.

Plant engineers must concern themselves with quality control, equipment downtime, equipment performance, excessive maintenance, effective training and technical support, bad parts due to inferior or no inspections: and all this with a constant eye on ROI.

The pressures of the job demand continued awareness of new ways to increase efficiency without harming the bottom line.

Smart engineers should consider smart cameras as a valuable tool to turn problems into points of pride.

Current smart camera technology provides an unparalleled system for part inspection, flaw detection, presence/absence detection, measurement and quality control.

Smart camera capabilities include easy setup, low cost, availability of training, remote diagnostics, exceptional technical support and 100% accuracy.

Smart cameras boast a number of powerful features.

Multiple cameras can be linked together.

They typically provide onboard digital I/Os which allow them to accomplish a number of tasks at one time.

Additional I/Os can be acquired via software.

Smart cameras can determine and execute exact standards for pass/fail tests and these pass/fail thresholds can be changed at any time to address changing standards.

Smart vision systems can communicate with other components to identify and reject bad parts off the line.

This means the inspection rate increases to 100% while the scrap rate from products lost to sampling bottoms out at zero.

The cameras can also be programmed to perform different task sets at different times.

For instance, a smart camera can check label position and barcodes on bottled beverages in the morning and then synchronise with an assembly line change to check bottle cap pressure in the afternoon.

Training and support is crucial for smart sensor technology to function at a peak level.

Windows-based software is easy to use and can perform such functions as "teaching" sensors to look for various characteristics that indicate compliance with pass/fail features or creating "blob tools" that can calculate image coordinates for objects and then apply the coordinate system sensor to convert those points into real-world values.

Live and online training classes often involve actual customer products and applications which yield great pragmatic benefits.

Support can come in a number of forms including telephone, on-site and online.

Some companies also offer remote diagnostics, allowing company technicians to teleconference with customers, take control of the customer's system via a remote computer, solve the problem, and then turn system control back over to the customer.

Training, support and software upgrades must be factored in to the total cost of ownership of a smart camera system, although one leading company offers training, support and software updates at no charge.

DVT regards itself as the machine vision industry leader, and is the only company that offers free training, free technical support, and free software upgrades.

The company makes this commitment as an outgrowth of its servant leadership model.

One thing is certain: the small package and low cost of smart cameras belie their tremendous power and flexibility.

Most smart cameras sell for under $10,000 but perform significant computer tasks with pinpoint accuracy in a wide variety of applications in automotive, packaging, plastics, electronics, pharmaceutical and other vertical markets.

And smart cameras are constantly getting smarter.

DVT has just introduced its Legend SmartImage sensors 550 series.

This new breed of camera is up to eight times faster than the DVT Legend 540 series, which was already regarded as among the fastest on the market today.

The wide range of smart camera applications continues to expand even further as they become the "eyes on the factory floor" for many facets of plant operation.

Take maintenance for example.

There may be no bigger challenge for a plant engineer than running an effective maintenance operation that can be justified to management when budget time comes.

On a round the clock basis, smart cameras can monitor various maintenance aspects including machine tool wear and tear, and fill levels that indicate a need to replenish exhaustible supplies.

In this way, smart vision technology can help a maintenance department ditch the "fire-fighting" mentality and instead become proactive when it comes to keeping green lights for all plant operations.

Taking the initiative in addressing maintenance efficiency always affects the bottom line.

When savings are calculated annually, the ROI of smart cameras is readily apparent.

Maintenance is coming under increasing financial scrutiny so the measured results that come from smart camera applications can be valuable.

Also, as this technology is applied to both the maintenance and engineering departments, it can serve to help bridge whatever gaps may exist since both would use a common operating system.

With or without us, technology is moving forward.

It's no fun to be a guinea pig for new gadgets but it's even less fun to be left behind.

When it comes to smart camera technology, the guinea pig period is long over.

It's high time for smart engineers to investigate smart cameras.

Back to top