Lolly Stick Inspection

This customer had a problem whereby the plastic product they were buying in, on which they mounted their frozen product, was continuously jamming the production system due to minor angular and length deviations. They therefore decided that the product should be inspected before entering the production cell.

In order to keep up with production rates a dual bowl feeder system was designed,
the task of which was to load two sticks at a time in to pneumatic jaws fitted to a
revolving table. The system featured two high resolution cameras (both performing identical image
processing tasks) utilising optimised lenses and light sources in order to get the most
accurate results possible. Once inspected, the system was capable of rejecting individual sticks out of the dual
jaws.

The machine was controlled by an Omron PLC with the vision system processor passing all of its run data via a proprietary protocol. The simplicity of the system paid off immediately with machine jams dropping to virtually nothing as soon as the inspection system went live.