Manufacturing Cell Simulation Environment for Automated Visual Inspection Using Robot First Report: Fundamental System

Recently the industries provide visual inspection processes in the plants for keeping and guaranteeing product quality. Many visual inspection processes are normally operated by the manual visual inspection. The results of the manual visual inspection are often unstable because the results are depended on the inspection worker skill. Currently the automated visual inspection technologies are getting more important to stably keep and guarantee product quality. Specially, the automated visual inspection technologies using robots attract the industries. The robot usually has several industrial cameras and LED lights on its hand. However based on our analysis for the typical implementation procedure of the automated visual inspection technologies using robots, the period to implement the inspection processes are usually very long. The reasons are that there are many adjustment activities in the real plant concurrently concerning the imaging conditions, the robot motion conditions, and the visual inspection conditions. In order to reduce the period to implement the automated visual inspection processes, it is very important to reduce the adjustment activates in the real plant. Therefore it is necessary to develop the simulation technologies to support the adjustment activates on the virtual beforehand. We focus on the manufacturing cell simulation environment for the automated visual inspection using robots. The manufacturing cell simulation environment which provides to support the above adjustments on the virtual even if the robot and the target product are not existed, is proposed and developed. In this paper, the manufacturing cell simulation environment to solve the problems is proposed. Seven requirements for the simulation environment are defined. The fundamental system with five functions to implement the simulation environment is proposed and implemented. Hypothetic fundamental case studies are carried out to confirm effective of our proposed manufacturing cell simulation environment.