Vision Based Fault Detection of Automated Assembly Equipment

Machine faults and breakdowns are a concern for the manufacturing industry. Automated assembly machines typically employ many different types of sensors to monitor machine health and feedback faults to a central controller for review by a technician or engineer. This paper describes progress with a project whose goal is to examine the effectiveness of using machine vision to detect ‘visually cued’ faults in automated assembly equipment. Tests were conducted on a laboratory scale conveyor apparatus that assembles a simple 3-part component. The machine vision system consisted of several conventional webcams and image processing in LabVIEW. Preliminary results demonstrated that the machine vision system could identify faults such as part jams and feeder jams; however the overall effectiveness was limited as this technique can only detect faults known prior to creating the vision system. Future work to create a more robust system is currently underway.