How

In the convening of the State Council meeting, Premier Li Keqiang emphasized the establishment of a plan to accelerate "Made in China 2025" and realize the upgrading of the manufacturing industry. Afterwards, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology selected representative units in various industries to guide enterprises to establish "Industry 4.0 smart factories" with the support of state funds. As a result, companies related to the automation industry have launched their own new products. A whirlwind that has changed the fate of Chinese manufacturing has arrived.

In this "storm", what cutting-edge technologies have been transformed into productivity; what technologies have disrupted the industry today; and what impact will these changes have on our lives in the future? As a high-tech company in the industry, Veishi Imaging has a few opinions about itself.

First, traditional automated production and inspection systems will be retrofitted and upgraded. At present, the traditional automation pipeline is shown in Figure 1 below. All the actuators and execution stations are set in advance, and then the actions are performed according to the programmed program.

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From the above system, it is clear that the control system is all one-way execution, and the main console only executes "execute command" and "execute algorithm", without paying attention to "execution result". This makes it difficult to ensure a high pass rate in the "quality control" link, and the way to improve the pass rate of product production can only be to improve the stability of each implementing agency, while at the same time eliminating various interference factors as much as possible.

With the concept of the "Industry 4.0 Smart Factory", Vevision Image Corporation proposed a closed-loop control system as shown in Figure 2 below. The design idea is based on local closed-loop control as the core design idea, and the main console as the core logical judgment center. Reached "anthropomorphic production."

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The newly launched "ISFTP4.0 Smart Factory" product shown in Figure 3 below by WeiShi Imaging is based on this architecture and has been widely recognized by experts at the "National Conference on Automation Education".

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Secondly, machine vision systems will be widely used. As mentioned above, the core of intelligent manufacturing is "anthropomorphism". Specifically, during the production process, the machine needs to "work while watching". This "observation" is the information collection and result feedback on the machine's execution of actions.

Before the concept of "Industry 4.0", machine vision technology was mainly used for product quality control, and only a few industries were used to assist production. Companies like Siemens, TCL, Foxconn, etc., just install a large number of different types of sensors (optical, gravity, temperature, etc.) on the automated production line to achieve "closed-loop control". However, the amount of information provided by such sensors is small, and only a single "yes / no" judgment can be made. The "anthropomorphic" requirements of the machine make the machine need to obtain a richer basis for judgment. Machine vision is based on the image obtained by the vision sensor, which contains a very large amount of information. With the continuous enrichment of image processing algorithms in the future, we will obtain more and more "useful" information from the image. Taking the MV-VS820 intelligent vision system introduced by Wei Shi image as an example, a set of systems can output "quality judgment results", "measured values", "visual positioning coordinates" and so on.

Embedded machine vision system

Thirdly, 3D information detection based on vision technology will be widely used. At present, machine vision technology widely used in various industries is mainly based on two-dimensional inspection (surface defect detection, two-dimensional size measurement, color recognition, character recognition, etc.). With the development of vision automation, machine-to-machine vision technology provides Information needs are increasing. The detection result of the two-dimensional information on the surface is far from enough, and three-dimensional vision technology will be the future development direction.

The binocular vision system launched by Wei Shi Image is a three-dimensional information detection system based purely on binocular vision technology. Its hardware architecture is shown in Figure 5. The system provides mathematical models for binocular vision, image pre-processing operators, stereo matching algorithms, and three-dimensional attitude measurement. Due to the adjustable baseline distance of the system, replaceable system hardware configuration, and secondary development, it can be applied in various occasions.

Binocular vision system

Finally, the underlying development of image processing algorithms will be given more and more attention. At present, among the various types of sensors, images obtained by industrial cameras (vision sensors) contain the most information. However, the current basic algorithms for image processing are still relatively inadequate. Although some popular image processing algorithm platforms such as Halcon, OpenCV, VisionPRO, and MVIPS have been widely used in many industries, the basic algorithms used by these platforms have only acquired images. Very little information.

Then with the development of visual technology in the future, the requirements for acquiring image information will become higher and higher, which will inevitably force universities and research institutes to study the underlying algorithms of image processing. Wei Shi Imaging Co., Ltd. has always followed the path of independent research and development. Through the establishment of a joint laboratory with Xi'an Jiaotong University's Automatic Control Institute, the XAVIS image processing platform has been specifically developed, which has solved this problem well and is at the forefront of the industry. Compared to other vision algorithm platforms, its typical feature is to support user-defined algorithm addition and evaluation.

XAVIS machine vision configuration software

Of course, "Made in China 2025" and "Industry 4.0" contain a lot of new technologies and new concepts. Wei Shi Imaging has always focused on the machine vision industry, only to talk about some of their own views from this aspect, hoping to play a role in attracting new ideas.