Automatic control of mechanical assys

Noomeo and Kineo CAM are collaborating to develop a solution for automatic control of the quality of mechanical assemblies.

Nowadays, most products that surround us are designed with computer-aided design (CAD) software. Resulting digital models (CAD models) are then used for the development of means of production that will enable the manufacture of parts.

One major difficulty is then to ensure that the result of production conforms to the original design. Non Destructive Testing (NDT) is a set of methods and techniques of perception and action implemented to verify such compliance. The origins of manufacturing errors are numerous: poor adjustment of machinery, tool wear ... but also, human operator errors when performing manual assembly, or when preparing machining or assembly performed by machines or robots.

In this context, Noomeo and Kineo CAM are collaborating to develop a solution called CAAMVis aiming at automating the quality control of mechanical assemblies by Artificial Vision. No learning phase is required other than loading the CAD model and identification of control points. Time savings are even greater when production lines must adapt to frequent configuration changes.

The assembly is inspected by the CAAMVis control system whose architecture consists of a robot arm equipped with a 2D/3D vision sensor, software for image processing and automatic comparison with stored digital models and software for automatic computation of 3D control sequences that are executed by the robot.

The main operations addressed by CAAMVis are:

• automatic selection of control points computed from the model and the current state of the assembly,
• motion planning of part holding and / or sensor holding manipulators allowing to reach previously computed control points,
• execution of generated robot trajectories,
• automatic comparison between the digital model and measurements made at each stage to check the compliance of the assembly.