Robotic automatic crease inspection system

Aim of the Project

Automate the inspection of creases and braille on cardboard sheets using a robotic system.

The creation of creases is a critical point in the carton manufacturing process, as the folding of the carton is totally dependent on them. If the creases contain errors, this can lead to machine failures.

Currently, within the packaging industry, crease checking is mainly carried out manually by an operator, combining visual and tactile analysis, by hand and by assessing the shape of the crease. This process is slow, error prone and subjective.

On the other hand, it is essential to carry out an inspection of the braille pattern that is embossed on your cardboard sheets, to ensure that it meets the standards and is correctly interpreted by the end users. Thus, in the EyeCrease project, a robotic system has been implemented in Igamo's facilities that moves along a sheet of cardboard and, using an on-board laser, scans the creases and Braille to analyse them using computational geometry and machine learning techniques and to ensure that the shape and dimensions of these are within the required tolerances.

Role of Vicomtech

Vicomtech has been responsible for the design and development of the robotic system that performs the inspection of indentations and braille. Vicomtech has also developed the software responsible for manipulating the robot (planning trajectories), digitising and processing the indentations and braille to extract their tolerances, classifying them using machine learning models and managing the inspection history to visualise status and trends.

Technologies used

• Computational geometry
• Machine learing

Field of application

The solution has been developed for Igamo, which is a packaging company.

Project partners

• Igamo
• Vicomtech

Project financing

• Basque Gobernment
• Basque Indstry Project