Saving a Major Automotive Manufacturer Over 1000 Hours
Wednesday 17 Sep 2025 · 2:45
This example is from a machine vision system application within the automotive industry.
However, the case study could have been from any industry, because a common process was taking place.
The Problem
Visicon were called in to look at an existing machine vision system that had been installed by another company.
The system was not optimised and the manufacturer was experiencing up to three hours of downtime every day.
That’s over 1000 hours of lost production every year!
The vision system was installed on a robot depalletising system, where it was coming in to pick up boxes from a pallet.
The system had been set up with a pair of bar lights – a type of light often used in vision systems, which provides a nice even distribution of light across the product.
While this is sometimes exactly what’s needed, in this particular case, the even lighting was causing problems for the camera.
With no real contrast at the edges and corners of the boxes, the camera was unable to detect the exact position of the box and was therefore missing it when trying to pick it up.
Creating Contrast
When we shine a light from both sides of an object, each light is also shining on what would be the shadows caused by the other light.
Therefore, the entire scene becomes bright and there’s no real difference between the edge of the box and the surrounding area. The camera can’t detect the edges and has no way of feeding the location information back to the robot.
To create the contrast needed, we had to remove the bar lights and replace them with a different lighting setup.
This is because bar lights are quite wide and cast a broad light. As such, they can still have the same problem of not producing enough contrast.
Visicon installed a single spotlight, shone from one corner of the box, creating a strong contrast at the opposite corner between the box and the surrounding area.
With the location of the corner known, the system could easily calculate the co-ordinates of the other corners, given the dimensions of the box.
The Simple Fix
Sometimes, a simple lighting change can make all the difference to the performance of a machine vision system.Understanding how light works is key to troubleshooting vision system errors and as we’ve seen here from the automotive industry, it can save many hours of downtime!
In this case, Visicon’s customer regained 1000 hours of production time for a relatively small investment.
If you’re experiencing downtime because of your machine vison system, book a discovery call now.
We’ll figure out how to solve the problem and get you back up and running as quickly as possible.