Industrial robots have been revolutionized by the application of machine vision systems. These systems are being used for various functionalities including appearance inspection, recognition, high-precision testing, and guidance and positioning. Appearance inspection has been the most widely replaced process which involves checking whether the products on the production line have any quality issues. The machine vision system is used heavily in the medical field for inspection of dimensions, bottle surface defects, shoulder defects, and mouth checking, to name a few.
Recognition entails processing, analyzing, and understanding images to identify different patterns of the target and objects. It is used in numerous industries for data tracking and acquisition such as automotive parts, food, and pharmaceuticals. High precision testing is required for some products where the precision level is as high as 0.01~0.02m or even at the u-level, and cannot be detected by the human eye.
Guidance and positioning require machine vision systems to quickly and accurately find the measured parts and confirm their location. The system is used for loading and unloading by guiding the mechanical arm to precisely grasp the object. In the semiconductor packaging field, equipment needs to adjust pick-up heads based on the chip position information obtained from the machine vision, so that it can accurately pick up the chip and bind it, making vision localization the most basic application of machine vision in the industrial field.
