Machine Vision - The 'Smart Eye' of Intelligent Manufacturing

《Made in China 2025》It is the first ten-year action plan for China to implement the strategy of building a strong manufacturing country, with the goal of transforming from a manufacturing power to a manufacturing power, with intelligent manufacturing being the main focus. In recent years, with the advancement of related technologies, China's manufacturing industry has gradually penetrated into high-end and complex fields such as assembly and testing. The 3C industry has a strong coverage scale and will become a new growth point for intelligent manufacturing at present.

Intelligent manufacturing is a new production mode that will adopt various advanced technologies, such asrobotArtificial intelligence, Internet of Things, big data, etc., further realize efficient, energy-saving, and flexible factories. among which,machine visionIt is an extremely critical technology for advancing towards advanced manufacturing.

Machine Vision: Opening up a New "Vision" for Intelligent Manufacturing

Computer vision is a technology that uses machines to replace human eyes for measurement and judgment. The main principle is to convert the captured target into an image signal through a camera product (i.e. image capture device), and then transmit it to a dedicated image processing system. The system converts it into a digital signal based on pixel distribution, brightness, color, and other information, and analyzes the formation of the captured target.

As a major branch of computer vision, industrial vision focuses more on the application of generalized image signals (lasers, cameras) and automation control (production lines). Compared with human eyes, industrial vision has obvious advantages in precision, objectivity, repeatability, cost, and efficiency.

Industrial vision can be used to detect surface information of products, measure product appearance dimensions in a non-contact manner, determine object position coordinates, and identify features such as color and shape of objects. From the perspective of application technology, industrial vision can not only cooperate with robots to achieve sorting, assembly, printing and other processes, but also perform high-performance and precision component detection and measurement. The latter requires higher precision, but it is also difficult for human eyes to achieve, and the demand is greater. Industrial vision is equivalent to giving the production process a pair of eyes, making manufacturing intelligent and opening up a new "horizon" for intelligent manufacturing.

At the 2019 OFweek 2019 China 3C Intelligent Manufacturing Technology Summit, Wu Changhao, Senior After sales Manager of Haining HAGONG Modern Robot Co., Ltd., gave a speechindustrial robotHow to empower 3C manufacturing theme to share industry experience, HAGONG Modern Robotics also showcased two models with modern machine vision systems at the summit, helping to fight for the intelligent path of the 3C industry!

The demand for machine vision is soaring, and it may become a blue ocean market

Represented by smartphones, new products such as full screen displays, fingerprint recognition, iris recognition, flexible screens, and even the entire electronic manufacturing field have set unprecedented precision standards for machine vision. In order to meet the constantly emerging demands of new applications, new development directions have emerged in the design of industrial cameras. From this perspective,Industry 4.0We cannot do without intelligent manufacturing, and intelligent manufacturing cannot do without machine vision. Machine vision is a necessary means to achieve industrial automation and intelligence, and it is also an extension of human vision on machines.

For a long time, the path of intelligentization in China's robotics industry has been plagued by machine vision problems. For a long time in the past, this core technology has been mastered by countries such as the United States and Japan. Compared with foreign countries, domestic machine vision technology is still relatively backward, and key technical equipment still relies on imports.

The global development of machine vision technology is becoming increasingly mature

The development of machine vision technology originated in the mid-1960s, proposed and studied by American scholar Roberts. By the 1970s, machine vision had formed several important research branches. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that machine vision experienced vigorous development, and after the 21st century, machine vision technology entered a mature stage.

Due to the dominance of foreign products with high value in core software and hardware, domestic manufacturers are catching up, but there is still a significant gap at present. The cost of core software and hardware accounts for 80% of the total cost of industrial vision. Foreign companies, with their strong research and development background and technological advantages, seize the vast majority of the market and generally enjoy high profits. Especially in the highest cost industrial cameras, industrial lenses, and image processing software, foreign products still have considerable advantages.

Machine vision, as the "eyes" of industrial automation, can be called the "window to the soul". Whether it is object barcode recognition and picking, product quality inspection, appearance size measurement, or transmission equipment tracking and positioning, machine vision technology is indispensable. Therefore, with the development of intelligent manufacturing, robot vision has also encountered new application demands. According to publicly available data, the global market size for machine vision technology used in industrial automation reached $4.44 billion in 2018, and is expected to reach $12.29 billion by 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 21%.

The Chinese market continues to expand, with a growth rate higher than the global level

Machine vision started relatively late in China, but due to its widespread application and rapid development in downstream industries, China has become one of the most active regions in the world for the development of machine vision. Its application scope covers various industries of the national economy such as industry, agriculture, medicine, military, aerospace, meteorology, astronomy, and scientific research. The important reason is that China has become a processing center for the global manufacturing industry, and the high demand for component processing and its corresponding advanced production lines have led to the entry of many internationally advanced machine vision systems and applications into China. After a long period of dormancy, Chinese machine vision has experienced explosive growth, with data showing that the scale of Chinese machine vision has reached 7 billion.

At present, domestic machine vision enterprises are constantly emerging. As a world-class comprehensive heavy industry, Jiangsu HAGONGintelligent robotA high-tech listed company focused on high-end intelligent manufacturing and robotics industry, and also the TOP1 supplier of white body welding in China. The company has rich intelligent manufacturing system solutions, robot bodies, industrial robot peripheral products, one-stop service platform for industrial robots, and profound technical accumulation. It is highly competitive in the automotive industry, metal industry, casting industry, food industry, plastic industry and other industries.

HA006B and HH020 models have been launched by HAGONG Hyundai, which are equipped with a modern machine vision system (HRVision) to enable robots to automatically track goods for handling, dispensing, text recognition, model inspection, and quality inspection of parts installation. They have reliability and verification channels, and have been installed and put into use in over a hundred vision systems worldwide. Significantly improve the quality and efficiency of enterprise production and manufacturing. HAGONG Hyundai will continuously update its products, expand more application areas, and strive to achieve increasingly widespread application in modern and future manufacturing enterprises.

In short, the current development of intelligent manufacturing is booming, bringing continuous momentum to society. Both "Made in China 2025" and "Industry 4.0" cannot do without intelligent manufacturing and machine vision, and machine vision technology will continue to develop and progress as the "smart eye" in the field of intelligent manufacturing. The future will surely shine brightly.

Article source: OFweek Robotics Network

He Yang/Organizing and recommending