Vision or Laser Profiler to Allen Bradley

irondesk40

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Jan 2008
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Have a application that is a roll of fabric that is approx 30 inches wide and moving on a conveyor at 50-80 yards per minute. We are looking at detecting if there is a hole in the fabric.
We have looked at a Keyence Vision System that looks like it will do the application. The concern is that the Vision system is something that would require technicians capable of working with it when needed. Hopefully all of the different types of fabric could be saved as a comparison which the Keyence is capable of but at some point somebody still has to maintain the Vision System.
I was on the Keyence web site and saw the Laser Profiler and then after doing a google search saw what a Laser Profiler is capable of doing.
Since the fabric is flat I was curious if anyone has tried a Laser Profiler. If there was a hole in the fabric it looks like the Profiler would see that as a defect.
The Vision system is capable but the Profiler appears to be a lot more simple for a technician on the equipment to maintain. It would not matter as much about the color of the fabric or the lighting and the fabric is always the same thickness.
Any suggestions for anyone who has experience with a Laser Profiler would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
 
at 80 yards/minute that if 240 ft/minute which is 4 ft/sec.

at that speed I seriously doubt any vision system can see a hole, I could be wrong, but vision systems has to take snapshots. I haven't used them in several years and could be proven wrong, but 30" wide at 4 ft/sec would be a stretch for me.

What ever you choose, have a demo unit in there and be ready to scrap some fabric in actual production conditions. otherwise you will buy the system, install it, and find out it doesn't work.

how small of a hole do you want to detect?
camera and system response time?
the pixel count of the camera must be high.

since you are dealing with fabric, that's a class 3 environment, you will have lots of fiber dust to deal with and that causes a problem for any system.

programming will be a big issue, have in in the po that there is a guy there 8 hours a day for 2 weeks training people, multiple people!

james
 
Just a quick thought
I think I would look at a fine spaced light curtain or 2 with them set up offset a little.
the beans passing through the fabric. If it passes through then you have a hole
 
We do defect detection on presses and label machines at 800ft/min(line scan cameras). And that's with pretty graphics to compare to a gold reference image.

Detecting a hole is somewhat simpler if you have any kind of contrast from the web to the background.
 
I worked with a system over 10 years ago made by DVT which did what you are looking for with black fabrics used in tire manufacturing. The rates were considerably slower and it took some fine tuning on the part of the integrator to get the "blob" detection working right. There were perforations in the product by design that needed to be ignored but holes above a certain pixel size needed to trigger rejection mechanisms.

We had a special high frequency fluorescent tube lamp behind the product aligned with the cameras. With vision systems lighting is everything. Consult with Cognex (now owner of DVT) and others and have them visit your site and make recommendations. I would expect that what you want is achievable even at those speeds with more than one modern vision system, but it has to be done right in order to succeed.
 
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thanks to everyone.
At the moment we will be testing with Keyence, but to be honest based on some vision projects we did years ago, i am not too excited about it based on the fact that vision systems we have it takes a good trained tech at all times to maintain if a problem comes up and in some of the third world places we now have production that is sometimes a challenge.
I liked the suggestions about the light curtain, but the what i thought might would be problem with this application is that it is tubular type material that is running flat and you may have a hole on the front but it does not go all the way through both sides.
Thanks
 
thanks for this info. have just finished talking to them on the phone and looks promising. going to send video to them and see how things go.
 
thanks for info. just finished talking to them on the phone and going to send a video etc. and see how things go.
 
i meant to say thanks Peter. I contacted the folks at Joescan and now actually will be working with getting them a video and see how it goes.
 

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