Visual A.I. for Quality Control

Scenario

Industry 4.0 adoption is rising with emphasis on mass customization, rapid product cycles, and faster delivery. This opens the scope for technology led advanced manufacturing practices to create high quality digital smart products efficiently. Quality inspection on the shop floor is one such area where technologies like IoT and Artificial Intelligence is gaining traction.

Currently, most manufacturers rely on human quality inspections to detect flaws, such as dents and cracks in the finished products. However, such human inspections are prone to errors owing to constraints posed by speed, accuracy, and cost. On the other hand, there is no way to identify causal factors for quality deviations, such as quality of raw input, operating conditions etc.

Challenge

How to enable automated quality detection with supplier quality checks to identify the root cause of errors?

Intelligent technology as an enabler

Computer vision is the fastest growing AI field with plenty of research to bring about industrial applicability. See the snapshot below from arXiv.org, an online archive of research articles.

According to Mckinsey, Manufacturing & Risk are the two business functions that have reported significant benefits from deploying computer vision.

Proposed Solution

Therefore, what we propose is a next generation solution called Visual A.I. for Quality Control specific to the discrete manufacturing. In the first phase, it will optimize the quality inspection process and later extend the value by bringing in supplier material checks through correlation.

The solution combines algorithm-based image analysis with process parameters, such as temperature and pressure to perform quality inspections. Additionally, such a system correlates supplier material quality, such as chromium, nickel composition in the input steel sheets, with output defects to better evaluate the supplier performance.

Snapshot of the visual quality dashboard in the proposed solution

Benefits

The solution increases the throughput by operating 24/7 in a consistent manner by eliminating human error caused due to speed of manufacturing lines and fatigue due to surrounding noises. Additionally, it decreases scrap by correcting manufacturing tolerances. Finally, the solution makes the supply chain more agile & responsive by correlating faults to input material quality and thus providing greater visibility to origins of defects in the supply chain.

Additional read: For further details into personas and proposed solution architecture, please access this ebook.

I am looking for partners and customers who would be willing to co-innovate. So, if you are interested in collaborating further on this topic, please reach out to me.