Cognex introduces the world’s first industrial smart camera powered by Deep Learning software. This combination expands the possibilities of what can be successfully and precisely inspected in factory automation.
Deep Learning and Artifical Intelligence (AI) are among the buzzwords not only in the manufacturing industry but also in many other fields. Deep Learning, a type of AI that leverages neural networks can be easily explained: Similar to how humans learn what a house is from a large number of examples, so too can a deep learning system come to understand the nature of an object from labeled images. Whether a car’s bumper, a package’s envelope, or something else, deep learning is an examples-based approach to solving inspection challenges. Furthermore, each inspection can be continually improved by feeding the existing algorithm with more example image data. This new data enhances the system leading to more accurate results.
Expanding the limits of automated inspection
Whether this is real intelligence or not, might be discussed by experts. From a practical point of view, the benefits for manufacturers are obvious and multiple. Manufacturers still rely on human inspectors throughout the production process because traditional machine vision systems cannot handle the complexity or variability within certain tasks. But humans can be prone to inconsistent results from one human to the next, or they can tire over the course of an eight hour shift. Additionally, there are many aspects throughout production that still go uninspected from one reason or another. Both of these realities open manufacturers up to quality control issues or the chances for recalls.
A vision system with integrated artificial intelligence, for example, is able to combine the judgement of a human inspector with the robustness and consistency of an automated solution for inspection or quality control. This is exactly the main advantage of the new In-Sight D900 vision system from Cognex.
