At its most basic, an engine installation took twenty minutes, the hood took five minutes, wheels got placed in ten minutes, and before anybody could expect, the impeccable framework of a brand new car was all-set. This scene playing on Discovery Channel was a replica of what happens regularly at all the major automobile manufacturing hubs including the Ford, General Motors, Bosch, and Mercedes-Benz. The parts of the car are added as the semi-finished assembly moves from workstation to workstation until the final assembly is produced. However, as the production lines become more mechanized and products are processed at unprecedented speeds, the likelihood for damage, breakage, and quality issues pose a sea of challenges for the manufacturers.

“Often caused by inaccurate measurements, poor angle alignments, and erroneous barcodes, product defect is a real problem for any plant manager and can affect the entire production cycle,” begins Phil O'Shaughnessy, VP, USS Vision. If ignored, a simple fault could cause damage to a large number of goods, resulting in unnecessary downtime and production losses. With an aim to create lean factories by improving quality and manufacturing operations, USS Vision—a Michigan-based company renders special machine vision error-proofing products and services to analyse the parts against the defined set of criterion and ensures the production of ideal goods.

The company’s USS Multi-View is a multiple camera inspection platform that can accommodate more than forty sensor heads at a time to scan the color images of a part and check against principle dimensions, presence and absence of parts, and angle orientations. The subsequent inspection data and high resolution images get automatically stored on multi-view controller to communicate directly with plant quality system and report the alert.“Our state-of-art Multi-View machine vision system is a cost-efficient model that serves as an ideal fit for mass-scale production centers,” expresses O'Shaughnessy. “Moreover, adding a sensor onto the Multi-View system is just about 30 percent of traditional smart sensor’s cost, making our platform much more optimal and attractive,” he adds.USS has already installed over 500 multi-view machines, including a 39 camera system inspecting over 450 items at a major original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

The ability of Exact Scan to record images at super high-resolution and cover a “wider” area enable companies to save hardware and maintenance costs

Besides USS’s hold over accommodating multiple sensors on a single state-of-art platform, the company also provides an exclusive, PC-based, sensor inspection system—USS Exact Scan—that scans multiple features of a product with sharp and fine details (4,000 x 9,000 pixels). “The ability of Exact Scan to record images at super high-resolution and cover a “wider” area to enable companies to save hardware and maintenance costs,” evinces O'Shaughnessy. Exact Scan is software that leverages powerful tools, along with a simple easy-to-read front-end display to impart ease for the plant engineers to learn.

The company credits its astounding global positioning to their dynamic Research & Development Center where evolving needs of manufacturing industry are taken care. “We had realized that Bead inspection is a critical part of the automation process,” says the VP. Toward this, USS Vision provides 100 percent total bead inspection with their unique and exclusive machine vision inspection systems. “We have designed, developed, and installed over a thousand bead inspection systems, along with structural adhesive, sealer, and RTV inspection systems,” states O'Shaughnessy.

For the coming years, the company is looking to maintain deep commitment towards the client needs and infuse progressive technology into the machine vision landscape. USS will continue to embed its innovative approaches and concept into their solutions.