Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOS
Visual and Acoustics Inspection of Ceramics
Description:
In the Ceramics Industry, quality control systems require a substantial amount of human resources and are a very time-consuming process. Additionally, this part of the manufacturing process has not recently received recently significant technological developments. Quality control is crucial to ensure that the pieces produced meet the necessary requirements to reach the market.
The detection of defects is mostly carried out through human visual examination by trained operators. Besides being time-consuming, this process is monotonous, repetitive, and strongly error-prone due to the human intervention. Thus, improving the performance of ceramic manufacturers, particularly in their quality inspection and part separation processes, is therefore a vital need of the production flow.
Considering the market needs and the innovation potential of the ceramic industry, AGIX, MATCERÂMICA, FRAUNHOFER and CTCV intend to develop technology to automate the inspection process of tableware, using computer vision and audio signal processing with machine learning. In this sense, the VAICeramics project (Visual and Acoustics Inspection of Ceramics) proposes to research and develop new technologies for automatic visual and acoustics inspection of tableware in the production process.
The consortium intends to develop a pre-industrial prototype to optimize and validate this approach. The prototype allows the automatic recognition of the type of part (eg: dish; bowl; cup) and includes a robot designed for handling the pieces to be inspected, which will perform the evaluation of the quality concerning its structural integrity, functional aspects and surface defects. This inspection will also integrate an acoustic test to capture and register the sound coming from a tapping made by the robot on the parts. The system automatically adapts to the different models of parts registered, without human intervention, separating the parts according to the result of the analysis.
Consult the project's Spec Sheet here:
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