A Vision of Perfection

With customers demanding zero defects, KeyTronic Corp. reexamined its most persistent quality problem - inspection for misloaded and defective keyboards. Programmers and engineers spent about 3 months designing and installing the first machine vision inspection system at the firm's Cheney, Washington, plant. There, a robot moved a camera to several preset fields-of-view where images of a keyboard, which was manually positioned by a technician, were recorded. System software analyzed the images, using pattern recognition algorithms to compare the captured image with a programmed pattern. When a discrepancy was found, the system displayed the failed key or keys on a video display monitor, and a printout identified the particular problem keys. The KT2000 keyboard is the first product manufactured using robotics. Robots move keyboard keys into the vision system's field-of-view, where they are inspected according to size, shape, color, and printing. The use of machine vision to solve keyboard problems was inevitable, as it is ideally suited for fast, repetitive inspections.