Enhanced product quality and production efficiency through application of real-time automated inspection

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Polycon is a major automotive plant located in Guelph, Ontario. The plant is one of Magna Inc. plants and specializes in manufacturing polymer based body parts like fascia and has around 1400 employees. A critical measurement of quality is that all shipped parts must be free from defects. Defects come in various forms and characteristics but can generally be categorized in three categories: physical, appearance, and colour matching defects. Appearance defects are defects that impact the overall look of a finished product such as orange peel (the surface of the part looks like the skin of an orange). Physical defects include any physical damage to the part surface including paint application defects such as edge drips and paint runs, dirt or fiber on the part, handling defects like bumps, nicks, scratches, gouges, and finally moulding defects. Colour matching defects are defects where the part's colour measurement doesn't meet the customer specification. In September 2013, the applicant was awarded an NSERC Engage grant to investigate the design of an automated inspection system at Polycon. After studying various defect types and their characteristics the applicant and his team were able to develop, implement, and test successfully an algorithm that was able to detect the most common physical defects. The team also designed and tested a preliminary prototype of a colour inspection system. Due to these encouraging preliminary results, a follow up Engage plus grant was started in July 2014 to continue this investigation. The objective of this proposal is to develop a real-time automated inspection system for full inspection of Polycon parts production. A prototype will first be tested at the University of Guelph. This will be followed by full system testing on-line at Polycon. This system will enable Polycon to realize significant quality improvement along with reduction of labour cost and wasted parts.