A Camera-Based Position Correction System for Autonomous Production Line Inspection

Visual inspection is an important task in manufacturing industries in order to evaluate the completeness and quality of manufactured products. An autonomous robot-guided inspection system was recently developed based on an offline programming (OLP) and RGB-D model system. This system allows a non-expert automatic optical inspection (AOI) engineer to easily perform inspections using scanned data. However, if there is a positioning error due to displacement or rotation of the object, this system cannot be used on a production line. In this study, we developed an automated position correction module to locate an object’s position and correct the robot’s pose and position based on the detected error values in terms of displacement or rotation. The proposed module comprised an automatic hand–eye calibration and the PnP algorithm. The automatic hand–eye calibration was performed using a calibration board to reduce manual error. After calibration, the PnP algorithm calculates the object position error using artificial marker images and compensates for the error to a new object on the production line. The position correction module then automatically maps the defined AOI target positions onto a new object, unless the target position changes. We performed experiments that showed that the robot-guided inspection system with the position correction module effectively performed the desired task. This smart innovative system provides a novel advancement by automating the AOI process on a production line to increase productivity.