APICUS (SME Instruments phase 1 project)
Handling a product to perform quality controls of all its zones at the end of the production process has been up to now a human prerogative. Complete integrity of final output is paramount in all industries. In the case of hollow glass containers, used as packaging for food & beverages, perfumery and pharmaceutics, it assumes an even more relevant role for ensuring shelf-life properties and safety of products for costumers.Nowadays there is a significant increase in non-standard shapes of containers following the market requests for customization. Hence, manufacturing processes are facing growing complexities in quality controls. Current technologies used for cold-end checks and for the reselection process of discarded products are limited to examine standard shapes and specialized per typology of defects with high occurrence of false positives phenomena responsible for increased production costs and slowed-down times.Video Systems aims to develop a ground-breaking inspection system, APICUS, to meet this unsolved market challenge. The outcome is a collaborative robot empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial vision (AV) systems which is able to handle a glass article in a human-like way, look at it and perform a thorough examination of all potential defects with extreme accuracy, significantly cutting down the occurrence of false positives.APICUS is expected to revolutionize the way quality controls are carried out contributing to better quality of products with close-to-zero defects, in line with the emerging paradigm of Zero-Defects Manufacturing.
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