Visual QA: visual inspection on the line, from the same camera
Visual QA finds the moment each part is made and checks it. It answers six questions, and each station uses only the ones it needs.
The six questions
- Is the dimension right?
- Edge detection and calibration
- Does it look normal?
- A model of what good looks like
- Is everything there?
- Detection in marked zones
- Is it the right part for this order?
- Match against references
- Is the process drifting?
- Control charts
- Is the machine behaving?
- Cycle-time statistics
Catching drift early
A cutter does not fail all at once. It wears. Each part can still pass while the trend moves toward the limit. A trend check can raise an alert before the first part goes out of tolerance. This describes how the check works. It is not a field result.
Setup
- Mount and aim: the live view tells you when the angle and focus are good.
- Stick the target: a printed marker gives real millimetres and notices if the camera moves.
- Teach the cycle: run ten parts as normal and confirm what it found.
- Show good: those parts become its idea of normal.
- Point at what matters: tap the edges, or draw a box.
- Shadow week: it watches and stays quiet, then your quality lead turns it on.
Under an hour per station is our target, and we are still proving it.
What a camera cannot do
- See defects inside the material.
- See the back of a part without a second camera.
- Measure finer than about 0.1 mm with sensible optics.
- Read shiny or transparent parts without lighting work.
- Continuous processes such as extrusion, for now.
Status
We are taking a small number of pilot factories. Validation on fixed cameras is still in progress, so we do not publish accuracy numbers yet.