Four tests are carried out: a vision inspection on a product’s LCD display; a high-potential test (HIPOT ); a power line communication test (PLC); and a functional test. During the vision inspection, the functionality of the LCD and indicating LED of the product are confirmed. In the past, operators performed tests through manual inspection, but more recently Sagemcom automated this through PC-based automatic test benches using Vision Builder for Automated Inspection.

In the HIPOT test, 3.2 KV is injected into a product to check its immunity to this high voltage. The interface with the accommodating instrumentation is through RS232, with a precise time frame for the leakage current’s measurement. The purpose of the PLC test is to simulate the behaviour of the product after field deployment while communicating with the data concentrator in the power line protocol.

The functional testing involves acquiring and analysing communication signals, and then interacting with a product’s button while acting with a cylinder. This test is quite sensitive due to the accuracy needed to interact with some buttons that have limited access.

Duplicating this architecture does not ensure contractual first pass yield (FPY) engagement due to the troubles observed with PC-based solutions (crashes, application bugs, and virus vulnerability). In addition, a budgetary improvement request has been introduced to limit investment on development budget and global solution costs. Considering all these criteria, Sagemcom faced a challenge, and turned to thinking of a constructive way to:

• Enhance FPY and robustness of test benches
• Reduce development time and save money
• Reduce test time and increase volume to save on our investment
• Reduce handling time to provide a better throughput and avoid operator-related delays
• Add technical value to the project (hiring a more qualified support team, taking our company from a pure manufacturer to special machine developer, and maintaining our manufacturing capabilities)

Reducing handling time and providing better throughput

After considering the challenge, the first step was to determine an efficient way to reduce handling time and deliver better accuracy while positioning products into test fixtures. Simulations concluded that a robotic cell configuration with a central robot for handling products and an additional smaller robot for performing functional test would work well.

Four test benches were interconnected and synchronised to ensure optimal process flow. Even though the robots were selected for better handling time, Sagemcom faced an additional challenge: finding the best way to program them for an efficient predictive algorithm and setting priority to robot handling.

The objective to reduce test time without neglecting robustness significantly impacts this challenge. The key was to identify the most suitable hardware architecture that can provide the highest level of robustness for each cell’s node. In fact, the project income was to guarantee that the adopted architecture could permit safe data exchange between each node in a way that the product could be functionally tested and inspected through vision.

Sagecom also needed to provide a necessary algorithm to set the priority for positioning the robot arms while communicating through DeviceNet protocol and supervising all safety sensors to prevent any security violation. A control platform was needed that could:

• Ensure vision processing
• Ensure parallel processing operations and advanced programming capability
• Support industrial protocols
• Exchange process information as safely as possible

After analysing the available solutions for machine control, Sagemcom focused on two possible compliant architectures: either using programmable logic controller platforms or the CompactRIO system from NI. The company chose CompactRIO because of the calculation power of its processor and FPGA, its support of a large number of industrial protocols, and its easy interoperability through LabVIEW programming.

The CompactRIO platform offers built-in vision capabilities and supports camera connectivity over USB and Gigabit Ethernet, which are key differentiators. This system leads to a fully integrated solution and we can save money by avoiding costly smart camera solutions coupled to programmable logic controllers. The CompactRIO platform can also accelerate embedded vision applications through the Vision Development Module, which includes many image processing functions that can run on both a real-time processor and an FPGA.

The possibility of using CompactRIO to perform true parallel operation through its FPGA offered a way to reduce test time by paralyzing acquisitions and test sequence.

Sagemcom adopted the cRIO-9030 for the project due to its powerful dual-core Intel Atom E3825, its high-value Kintex-7 FPGA, and the possibility of handling an embedded user interface through its MiniDisplay port, which could help save investment by using additional PCs for deporting HMI.

Reduced development time and reduced investment

While confident that LabVIEW would suit this project, there was an initial fear that the migration and upgrade of actual source code from the PC would take additional development time and resources. However, due to the inherent scalability of LabVIEW, some 70 percent of the code was able to be reused when changing the hardware platform from PC to CompactRIO, with minimal coding effort. This saved a significant amount of development time and cost.

In addition, the large set of control and mathematics libraries available in LabVIEW provided great support for developing the predictive algorithm to evaluate robot positioning. LabVIEW also offered support for industrial communication protocols for robotic interfacing like DeviceNet with the release of NI-Industrial Communications for DeviceNet 15, which saved many man hours.

Due to the high interoperability of the CompactRIO system and the native support for true parallelism and precise time looping through FPGA, Sagemcom reduced test time by 21 seconds, which led to 17 percent productivity growth. This represents a higher throughput and a significant return on investment. The company also reduced the number of controllers by using one cRIO-9030 for all test benches instead of a single industrial PC for each machine. This saved 50 percent on controller cost.

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“Using LabVIEW and the LabVIEW RIO architecture allowed us to reduce the time of developing and testing a new robot control algorithm to just one week, compared to one month with a text-based approach,” says DongJin Hyun, senior research engineer, Central Advanced Research and Engineering Institute, Hyundai Motor Group. “We are able to prototype with software and hardware faster and adapt to rapidly changing control requirements quicker.”

LabVIEW has been used across a wide variety of industries to drive higher performance and product quality. LabVIEW 2015 further equips engineers with support for advanced hardware such as the quad-core Performance CompactRIO and CompactDAQ Controllers, 8-core PXI Controller, and High Voltage System SMU.

LabVIEW 2015 also reduces the learning curve for employing a software-designed approach to quickly create powerful, flexible, and reliable systems. With three application-specific suites that include a year of unlimited training and certification benefits, developers have unprecedented access to software and training resources to build better systems faster.

LabVIEW 2015 continues to accelerate engineering productivity with an impressive collection of features designed to help developers open, write, debug, and deploy code faster.

• Open code faster – open large libraries up to 8X faster and eliminate prompts to locate missing module subVIs
• Write code faster – execute common programming tasks faster with seven new time-saving right-click plugins and develop your own additional plugins to maximise your productivity
• Debug code faster – examine arrays and strings in auto-scaling probe watch windows and document findings with hyperlink and hashtag support in comments
• Deploy code faster – offload your FPGA compilations to the LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud service included with your Standard Service Program membership

LabVIEW 2015 is extended by the LabVIEW Tools Network, which has been enriched by IP both from NI and third-party providers. The new Advanced Plotting Toolkit by Heliosphere Research furnishes developers with powerful programmatic plotting tools to create professional data visualisations. The RTI DDS Toolkit by Real-Time Innovations enables IoT applications with scalable peer-to-peer data communication. Additionally, application-specific libraries for biomedical, GPU analysis, and Multicore Analysis and Sparse Matrix applications are now available free of charge.

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The challenge came when cosmetics packaging line specialist Vetraco approached NI Silver Alliance Partner ImagingLab for a machine vision and robot solution that would identify the position and orientation of face powder brushes, pick them up and place them in a powder case on an eight-slot shuttle. Further complicating the process, the system had to be flexible enough to work with different brushes and box shapes in different batches.

The solution was to use the ImagingLab Robotics Library for Denso to integrate two Denso SCARA HSS-45552 model robots with two vision systems developed with two NI image acquisition boards, and program the entire robot cell with LabVIEW and the NI Vision Development Module.

To achieve the rate of 80 pieces per minute required by Vetraco, ImagingLab installed twin robotic stations. The brushes are loaded on a programmable feeder that shakes to spread them apart and make them available for picking. This feeder is interfaced to the cell via a LabVIEW library.

The vision system based on a NI image acquisition board, an AVT 1,400 by 1,000 pixel CCD camera, and an ImagingLab custom infrared illuminator acquires the images of the brushes, determines their positions, and communicates the coordinates for the part picking to the robot. If there are no parts available for picking, the system shakes the feeder to deposit more brushes under the camera. The system chooses between four possible shaking modes – shake forward, shake backward, shake neutral, and load more parts – to activate based on information from the vision system.

“By adopting the LabVIEW platform, we successfully programmed, prototyped, and tested new robotics applications very quickly.”

The system places the brush boxes’ eight-slot trays in front of the robot at fixed positions. The brushes can have a random position on the feeder and the vision system has to localise the position and orientation of each part because every brush must be placed in its box with the correct orientation. Additionally, the robot has a multiple gripper for four brushes so the vision system has to identify and locate the position of four brushes at each picking cycle. When a tray becomes full, a new one arrives. The robotic cells work 24 hours per day, seven days per week, rejecting any defective parts.

The vision system guides the robots and provides quality control on the parts by measuring the dimensions and verifying the integrity. Using the ImagingLab Robotics Library for Denso, ImagingLab implemented tight vision and robotics integration. As a result, the user can calibrate imaging and robotics with only one operation.

Visit the National Instruments website or the Denso Robotics website for more information.

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