Track: Engineering Education

Abstract

With the demands of quality management and process control in the industry, machine vision is becoming an important tool to improve inspection quality and speed. It is predicted that the vision inspection techniques may replace traditional inspection methods soon. Machine vision is the automatic extraction of information from digital images for process or quality control. An automated machine vision is better suited to repetitive inspection tasks. Measurement, counting, location, and decoding are some of the most common applications for machine vision. The research project work presented here is based on the faculty led undergraduate student “hands-on” research sponsored by the university grant. Four different colored gear models are analyzed using an image processing software. A vision guided industry type robot is used to make the quality control decision by picking the good part from the bad parts based on image processing criteria. This research work enhanced the research experience for the student as well as for the faculty and improved the class room pedagogy for the mechanical engineering courses. The gear models, robot programming software, hardware setup, and vision tool software are presented in this article.  The vision guided robot performed the quality control function consistently.