Unified Approach to Path Planning Algorithm for SMT Inspection Machines Considering Inspection Delay Time

This paper proposes a path planning algorithm to reduce the inspection time of AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection) machines for SMT (Surface Mount Technology) in-line system. Since the field-of-view of the camera attached at the machine is much less than the entire inspection region of board, the inspection region should be clustered to many groups. The image acquisition time depends on the number of groups, and camera moving time depends on the sequence of visiting the groups. The acquired image is processed while the camera moves to the next position, but it may be delayed if the group includes many components to be inspected. The inspection delay has influence on the overall job time of the machine. In this paper, we newly considers the inspection delay time for path planning of the inspection machine. The unified approach using genetic algorithm is applied to generates the groups and visiting sequence simultaneously. The chromosome, crossover operator, and mutation operator is proposed to develop the genetic algorithm. The experimental results are presented to verify the usefulness of the proposed method.