Quality control of heat sealed bottles is very important to minimize waste and in some cases protect people’s health. The present paper describes a case study where an automated non invasive and non destructive quality control system was designed to assess the quality of the seals of bottles containing pesticide. In this case study, the integrity of the seals is evaluated using an artificial neural network based on images of the seals processed with computer vision techniques. Because the seals are not directly visible from the bottle exterior, the images are infrared pictures obtained using a thermal camera. The method is non invasive, automated, and can be applied to common conveyor belts currently used in industrial plants. The results show that the inspection process is effective in identifying defective seals with a precision of 98.6% and a recall of 100% and because it is automated it can be scaled up to large bottle processing plants.
To keep several robots in geometric formation several issues have to be considered. This paper describes an experimental system for controlling multiple robots in geometric formation. This system has a mixed control structure, where both a central coordinator is used and also each robot has a high level of autonomy. The relative locations of the robots are estimated using vision. The central coordinator is used to decide the type of formation and to inform the robots about the formation type. Each robot is autonomous to make any decisions relative to the control of its position and velocity. Any of the robots can act as the central coordinator, but at any instant of time there is only one coordinator. The type of geometric formation can be dynamically changed and it depends on the overall goal of the system or on dynamic changes of the environment. To keep the robots in geometric formation their relative positions and orientations have to be known and they are estimated using vision.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.