Detailed description of machine vision system for industrial robots

In the background of industrial 4.0 era with intelligent manufacturing as the core, with the deepening of the strategy of "Made in China 2025", the industrial intelligent robot industry market has shown explosive growth momentum, among which the role of machine vision as the "golden eye" of industrial robots plays an important role.

So what kind of "wisdom eye" does machine vision give industrial robots, which can greatly help industrial robots to develop on the road of industrial automation and intellectualization 4.0 in the future?

Machine Vision System for Industrial Robots
 
As the "brain central nervous system" of industrial robots, AI has been in a sustained high-speed development stage in the past few years. Many industrial robots have already possessed quite high intelligence characteristics, but they are far from the level of intelligence envisaged by human beings.

The real realization of industrial automation requires highly intelligent industrial robots to replace part of human work. Obviously, if we want robots to replace human work well, the first thing we need to do is to make them "see" to do, not only that, in our daily life we use a lot of wisdom. Enabling things also need to be seen, including smart UAVs and smart vacuum cleaners.

Of course, industrial robots are no exception. When industrial robots have the ability to observe things, they can judge things well, so that they can solve some problems intelligently and flexibly. Moreover, under the influence of industrial 4.0, the requirements of intelligent manufacturing for industrial robots are getting higher and higher. Traditionally, they are programmed. Robots that perform a specific action will no longer be able to meet the needs of the manufacturing industry.

In many cases, we will need robots to be able to identify, analyze, process and other advanced functions, that is to say, we need to install a pair of "golden eyes" for industrial machines to replace the human eye for measurement and judgment. Machine vision is equivalent to installing "eyes" for industrial robots, so that they can be clearly and tirelessly. It is very important in highly automated large-scale production to see objects and display the function of human eye inspection and detection.

Machine vision system can convert the captured objects into image signals through machine vision products, i.e. image capturing devices, and transmit them to a special image processing system. The shape information of the captured objects can be obtained. According to the information of pixel distribution, brightness, color, etc., the captured objects can be converted into digital signals, and then the image system can transmit these signals. Various operations are carried out to extract the features of the target, and then the device action on the spot is controlled according to the results of the discrimination.

Generally speaking, machine vision is to use computers to simulate human visual functions. It has a part of the functions of human brain to extract information from the image of objective things, process and understand them, and ultimately to be used in the actual detection, measurement and control automation work in industrial intelligent manufacturing. Intelligent manufacturing combines industrial robots with machine vision. Machine vision will be the next direction of artificial intelligence.

How to Use Machine Vision in Industrial Application

Machine vision industry is widely used with four main functions:

1. Guidance and positioning. Visual positioning requires that machine vision system can quickly and accurately locate the parts under test and confirm their positions. Machine vision is used to locate the loading and unloading materials and guide the manipulator to grasp accurately. In the field of semiconductor packaging, the device needs to adjust the pickup head according to the position information of the chip acquired by machine vision, pick up and bind the chip accurately, which is the most basic application of vision positioning in the field of machine vision industry.

2. Appearance inspection: testing the quality of products on the production line, which is also the link that replaces the most manual. Machine vision involves the medical field. Its main detection includes size detection, bottle body appearance defect detection, bottle shoulder defect detection, bottle mouth detection and so on.

3. High-precision detection: Some products have high precision, reaching 0.01-0.02 m or even U-level, and human eyes can not be detected must be completed by machine.

4. Recognition: Machine vision is used to process, analyze and understand images, in order to identify the targets and objects of different modes. It can trace and collect data, and it is widely used in automobile parts, food, medicine and so on.

Generally speaking, the characteristics of machine vision system are to improve the flexibility and automation of production, mainly in dangerous working environment unsuitable for human work or in situations where artificial vision can not meet the requirements, machine vision is often used to replace artificial vision; at the same time, in mass industrial production process, artificial vision is used to inspect production. The quality efficiency is low and the accuracy is not high. The machine vision detection method can greatly improve the production efficiency and automation of production. Moreover, machine vision is easy to realize information integration, which is the basic technology to realize computer integrated manufacturing.