The "Eye of Wisdom" keeps an eye on the production line to help the intelligent upgrading of automobile manufacturing

Equipment is performing gluing quality testing on body parts Courtesy of the interviewee

After more than ten years of joint research by industry, education and research, the team has established for the first time more than 10 kinds of industrial visual inspection equipment systems in 4 categories including measurement, guidance, detection and identification, and its independently developed vision products have been systematically applied on a large scale in the automotive and aerospace fields.

Visual inspection is known as the "eye of wisdom" of intelligent manufacturing, applied in the industrial field, can replace the manual completion of identification, measurement, positioning, detection and other work, is a necessary means to achieve industrial automation and intelligence.

But for a long time, the field of industrial vision inspection has been monopolized by foreign brands. The core team originates from The State Key Laboratory of Precision Testing Technology and Instruments of Tianjin University, Yisiwei Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Yiwei), after more than ten years of joint research by industry, education and research, for the first time, it has established more than 10 kinds of industrial visual inspection complete equipment systems in 4 categories including measurement, guidance, detection and identification, and its self-developed visual products have been systematically applied in the automotive and aerospace fields. Recently, the company's "intelligent manufacturing high-performance vision detection complete set of technology and equipment" project won the 2021 Tianjin Science and Technology Progress Award Special Prize.

Basic research and development promotes the application of vision inspection industrial scenes

Visual inspection originates from computer vision, but is not exactly equivalent to computer vision, visual inspection is more focused on engineering applications, in terms of accuracy, speed, adaptability, objectivity, repeatability, reliability, efficiency, photosensitive range and information integration, are better than human vision. Therefore, at present, visual inspection is widely used in the field of industrial automation, especially in the scene of high accuracy requirements, fast movement speed of detected items and high work repeatability, high-performance visual inspection complete sets of technology and equipment can achieve intelligent transformation, reduce employment costs and improve production efficiency for enterprises.

Therefore, driving process iteration with high-performance detection methods, improving product quality, and meeting diversified customization requirements have become an urgent need to enhance the core competitiveness of Chinese manufacturing.

However, some manufacturing areas of visual inspection products have long been monopolized by foreign countries, mainland manufacturing enterprises need to buy at high prices, and engineers are in foreign countries, once there is a problem in the use of equipment, after-sales maintenance communication costs are very large. In addition to being costly, it can also cause wasted time and affect production planning.

"Although vision inspection technology is not esoteric, it is not difficult to apply to actual scenes, especially in industrial manufacturing environments with complex environments and many interference items." Zou Jian, head of the R&D center of Yisi (Tianjin) Technology Co., Ltd., introduced that in the industrial manufacturing site environment, limited by the diversity and complexity of lighting, electromagnetic and spatial structures, visual detection generally has technical problems of low reliability, poor real-time and weak adaptability, while the application of technology presents the characteristics of fragmentation, locality and assistance, and it is urgent to break through the core technology and form a complete set of technologies and product systems.

To this end, the team starts with basic research and development. In order to make the "eyes" and "brains" better coordinate in complex environments, they solve the problem of high stability, strong adaptability and high precision of vision inspection systems in the field environment.

In order to allow the "eye" not to be disturbed by the surrounding environment and better identify the work in hand, the team has overcome the special optical characteristics, high-precision online visual detection technology of complex surface structure objects, visual detection accuracy control and error compensation technology in complex manufacturing environment, industrial visual inspection performance enhancement technology that is deeply integrated with the manufacturing process, and also solves the problem of high-precision and efficient measurement of multi-dimensional and multi-parameter geometric features at the manufacturing site.

After breaking through various technical problems, the team integrated all technologies, and finally formed a complete set of visual inspection technologies such as large-size automatic blue light scanning, global tracking online measurement, robot vision guidance, etc., and established a complete set of technical systems for comprehensive geometric information perception at the manufacturing site.

In order to match the complete set of visual inspection technology, the team also developed a series of high-performance vision sensors and measuring equipment, which solved the problem of complete sets of measurement equipment guarantee urgently needed for intelligent manufacturing.

At present, the project has been authorized a total of 61 invention patents, 72 utility model patents, and 59 software copyrights.

Solve a number of problems in the field of automotive intelligent manufacturing

"From the technical exploration in the laboratory to the market-oriented product application, we continue to deeply participate in the automobile manufacturing process, gradually excavate more application scenarios, and have developed more industrial visual inspection equipment in 4 categories, including measurement, guidance, detection and identification, so as to realize the large-scale and systematic application of the four major processes of stamping, welding, painting and final assembly for automobile manufacturing." Liu Meitian, the main person in charge of Yisi (Tianjin) Technology Co., Ltd., said.

After the use of industrial vision inspection equipment, the production efficiency of the enterprise has been greatly improved.

Zou Jian said for example, for the paint detection of the painting process, the current common production line on this link is detected through the combination of human eye observation and hand touch, because the tiny depression or bulge is only the diameter of the hair, it is difficult for the human eye to accurately and stably identify for a long time, and only by relying on experienced teachers can be perceived through the combination of eyes and touch. The paint visual detection sensor, through the "micron level three-dimensional perception" technology, is like the real restoration of the three-dimensional morphology of the surface of the analyte under a high magnification microscope, the detection accuracy can reach one percent of the diameter of the hair, and then through the algorithm to analyze and judge the data, the defect is stable and accurate detection, not only greatly improves the accuracy and stability of the detection, reduces the intensity of manual labor, but more importantly, realizes the digitization and automation of the detection, combined with the automatic grinding technology of the defect, greatly improving the degree of production automation.

In addition, the use of industrial vision inspection equipment can improve the automation rate of enterprise production, improve product quality, and reduce enterprise costs.

"Generally speaking, the automation rate of automobile manufacturers can reach more than 80%, but the paint inspection process like this still needs to be carried out manually." Zou Jian introduced that manual operation is affected by the technical level and physical condition of workers, and ultimately affects the results of testing. And workers need to go through a long period of training before taking up their jobs, and the machine only needs to adjust the parameters and train the operators for a few hours, and they can be on the job like an experienced "old worker".

"Through the guidance of our equipment and the application of visual inspection methods, one equipment can replace two or three workers to work, which can further improve the automation rate of automobile manufacturing enterprises and greatly save the labor costs of enterprises." Zou Jian said.

At present, in the field of automobile manufacturing, some technologies in the visual inspection equipment of Easy Thinking have reached the world's leading position.

"At present, many foreign friends are already following our products." Zou Jian explained that the deviation of the position of the workpiece that our equipment can accommodate is better than that of imported equipment, which can greatly reduce the requirements of the production line for mechanical positioning accuracy and greatly reduce the manufacturing cost of the production line.

For example, Zou Jian said, for example, when installing a large piece such as a car side wall in the welding process, the robot should grab the side wall from the material box and load it into the car body. Using equipment with small tolerance, when the position of the side wall is out of the tolerance range, the robot is "overwhelmed" and cannot complete the automatic grasping, resulting in production stoppages and causing huge losses to the automobile factory. Devices with large tolerance ranges for better stability.

Cut the price of imported products by half

"At that time, in the field of automobile manufacturing, the imported high-performance vision inspection technology and equipment were very expensive. After the launch of the product of Easy Thinking, the price of this product was reduced by about half at once. Liu Meitian said.

In addition, easy thinking of visual inspection technology covers the whole process of automobile manufacturing, solves the drawbacks of scattered, partial and auxiliary technology applications, once the enterprise has a equipment failure in the use of the process, no longer as before, the need to contact a number of enterprises for after-sales maintenance, greatly improving the efficiency of communication.

At the same time, the full set of equipment breaks the digital island, connects the data between different devices, and provides a reliable reference for enterprises to optimize production lines and improve production efficiency.

At present, Yiwei has become the "hidden champion" of the domestic automobile manufacturing visual inspection market segment for many years, completely breaking the monopoly of foreign countries. "The complete set of high-performance visual inspection technology and equipment has been widely used in mainstream automobile factories, which has promoted the intelligent upgrading process of the domestic automobile manufacturing industry around visual inspection technology." Guo Yin, general manager of Yiwei, said.

In addition to the field of automobile manufacturing, today's easy-thinking technology is also widely used in high-end manufacturing fields such as aerospace, aviation, rail transit and shipbuilding. At present, Yiwei has gone abroad and obtained foreign orders from the United States, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Vietnam and other foreign countries, becoming a Chinese business card in the field of visual inspection applications in automobile manufacturing. (Reporter Chen Xi)

Source: Science and Technology Daily