Defects Detection on Metal Surfaces in Robot Grinding

ESPRIT Project 2640 is dealing with integrated process control and inspection in robot finishing. The starting idea of this project came from the problem of defects encountered in manual grinding of castings (water taps). Hence, the project team worked out an advanced scenario for solving this problem by robotising the grinding process and replacing human inspection by computer vision. This article will concentrate on the work on the automated visual inspection of castings. The work of the project has been articulated around four main directions: image acquisition defect detection algorithms dedicated hardware architecture and inspection path planning