Robust and High-Performance Machine Vision System for Automatic Quality Inspection in Assembly Processes

This paper addresses the problem of automatic quality inspection in assembly processes by discussing the design of a computer vision system realized by means of a heterogeneous multiprocessor system-on-chip. Such an approach was applied to a real catalytic converter assembly process, to detect planar, translational, and rotational shifts of the flanges welded on the central body. The manufacturing line imposed tight time and room constraints. The image processing method and the features extraction algorithm, based on a specific geometrical model, are described and validated. The algorithm was developed to be highly modular, thus suitable to be implemented by adopting a hardware-software co-design strategy. The most timing consuming computational steps were identified and then implemented by dedicated hardware accelerators. The entire system was implemented on a Xilinx Zynq heterogeneous system-on-chip by using a hardware-software (HW-SW) co-design approach. The system is able to detect planar and rotational shifts of welded flanges, with respect to the ideal positions, with a maximum error lower than one millimeter and one sexagesimal degree, respectively. Remarkably, the proposed HW-SW approach achieves a 23× speed-up compared to the pure software solution running on the Zynq embedded processing system. Therefore, it allows an in-line automatic quality inspection to be performed without affecting the production time of the existing manufacturing process.