Q+A CENTER

Prior to this machine vision advance in the semiconductor industry, when the machine was taken out of service, engineers would use mechanical gigs and calipers to set up tools. All of it was very mechanical and required that the tools be taken apart manually.

"In many cases, they had to disassemble the tool to get to the locations to teach the robot," Bonciolini explains. "With this, you can go into the chamber under actual conditions; you can go in and out and collect data. The image-transfer time is 1-2 frames per second and you get real-time video on a laptop. You see what the sensor sees in less than 10 seconds. Some people use it as a camera to see if they need to go in [to do any adjustments].

The previous teaching method took two technicians about eight hours. One watched the robot and one ran the tool. "With one technician and our device, it's done in less than two hours," Bonciolini says.

Cylindrical Surfaces

Cognex's OmniView inspects the entire cylindrical surface of bottles, cans, vials or cosmetic containers without orientation or accurate positioning. It uses four cameras to obtain a 360-degree view of all features on the entire surface and can read barcodes, verify text, inspect graphics and measure features at production line speeds of up to 1,200 parts per minute.

The beauty of the vision software is that it no longer requires stopping and rotating each cylindrical object in front of a line scan camera, which of course slows down the production line.