Home Appliances
Visual quality assurance for home appliances
Computer vision for home appliances manufacturing
In the manufacturing of home appliances, quality assurance is typically performed through a functionality test of the finished products. Due to the detection of defects in the last stage of production, manufacturers have a high rate of waste.
Automated quality assurance can be installed at any critical assembly point. Thanks to the timely quality inspection, the production process becomes more sustainable. In addition, this allows manufacturers to perform a root cause analysis of visual defects.
Fault inspection in Metal Coated Surfaces
Customer
Premium home appliances manufacturer
Problem
Complex defects like pores, chip offs, pinholes, blisters and scratches are critical for functionality of home appliances. Visual defects also harm customer satisfaction. These defects are difficult to detect on reflective surfaces under changing light conditions.
This setting challenged the home appliances manufacturer seeking automation to improve time and labour intense quality operations.
Solution
The manufacturer of home appliances installed automated QA from 36ZERO Vision. A camera portal with iPhones was deployed to the assembly line.
The solution identifies and categorises complex defect types and specifies the area of occurrence.
Images & results are stored in the customer IT. Information is sent to the PLC to remove defective parts from production.
Results
The home appliances manufacturer could reduce errors occurring in later production stages. The customer could also improve the quality operations due to standardising of error types.
Rework efforts in the final assembly were reduced compared to the previous workflow. Throughput was increased significantly.
Production targets are reached without additional investment. Scrap and quality costs were significantly decreased.