Manufacturing anything requires constant quality control. Employees in charge of quality control can do a reasonably good job, but even they can miss something if they are tired, distracted, or unable to focus on the tasks at hand. If you want to increase quality control measures and decrease problems in production and final products, adding more employees may help, but the right direction to take here is with machine vision, like Cognex machine vision. Here is what these machines can do in terms of spotting problems in production before consumers experience the problems firsthand.

Cameras with High Pixel Resolution

Special cameras in the production line scan each item as it passes by. The cameras are equipped with high pixel resolution in order to see the parts of the items being made and make sure they are flawless and functional. If the cameras pick up on something that does not look right in the system, they send the image to an employee's computer screen to okay it. It will also tag the item so that it continues in production but can still be found and/or pulled if an employee looks at the suspect image and decides that it is too flawed to continue in the production line. 

Alerts Regarding Products Gone Very Wrong

The system already sends pictures of products that appear to have slight flaws. However, when a product on the line is really askew and previous steps have somehow jumbled it into a mess (it happens — products get bumped and jostled at odd angles sometimes), the system catches it and can be programmed to shut off the line until the object is pulled or repositioned properly. If you choose, you can also set up an alarm that sounds when a very faulty product tries to slip past the machine vision cameras. This might even be a faster means of catching faulty products than waiting for the cameras to send pictures to a monitored screen with tagged items to check after said items have already gone by. 

Numbering and Recording Inventory for Sale and Shipment

Near the end of the quality assurance and production lines, products will start flying by faster. They have passed inspection and are ready to be counted and recorded as inventory for sale and shipment fulfillment. The vision cameras are able to count much higher and faster and to record in real-time what the plant has ready and on hand to ship/sell. 

For more information, contact a company like Advanced Motion Systems.

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