Computer vision has been deeply integrated in manufacturing for 20+ years. if you've brushed your teeth or drank a sports drink in the last 10 years, your toothbrush or bottle has probably gone through a vision system that I write the software for.<p>(Not Cognex)
? Does not mention Keyence and others.<p>Honestly though, the suits i worked with, were all very dated and used hand constructed feature filters etc. to detect flaws. Usually, it was easier to adapt the environment (exclude external light etc.) instead of lengthy tuning sessions for the installer.<p>Usually the industrial cameras were also designed, so that local maintainers could readjust them, which excluded complex programming and happened in simple wizards or excel like programming surfaces. There was no time planned in to "retrain" further once the line was running. And it was cheap and good enough that way.<p>Thus the "cutting" edge tech seemed to be eternally 20 years behind the cutting edge in other sectors relying on machine vision.
Here’s Fanuc M-1iA series robot organizing pills by color back in 2018 @ <a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/bdosfVWhhlQ">https://youtube.com/shorts/bdosfVWhhlQ</a> …I can only imagine what they have now!
In the corruagted box industry, we use camera systems to elimate missed glue lines on tabs, skewed folds, and misaligned print in real time as the material goes through the manufacturing machines.<p><a href="https://www.valcomelton.com/industrial-products/inspection-cameras-sensors/clearvision-camera-systems/" rel="nofollow">https://www.valcomelton.com/industrial-products/inspection-c...</a>
Useds few Basler GigE and USB3 camerasfor a robotics competition at the university, was fun, cameras were easy to use.. only later I saw how they are used in the industry.
Unfortunately, until we really need to push high scale manufacturing back to the states, it’s not changing anything for US manufacturing. I worked for a company that took almost a decade just to change from devicenet to ethercat, predictive analytics took 5. Any sort of “smart” system just doesn’t have a huge momentum unless we’re producing items at China rate and need to maintain cost low.