100% control with machine vision & robots

Quality controls are often random and visual. However, for many products such as chemicals, drugs or food, 100% control is desired. EKB offers total solutions for this, combining advanced machine vision applications with robotics and data analysis software. Linking to ERP and MES systems also creates opportunities to use collected data company-wide for optimization, maintenance and benchmarking.

What began as a small manufacturer of switch boxes and control panels has grown over five decades into a national service provider in the field of industrial automation with five branches. Over the years, a vast amount of knowledge and experience has been accumulated in the fields of vision, robotics, data analysis and motion & control. By combining these disciplines, the company is able to develop advanced solutions for a variety of issues.

Label Control

One application where all these disciplines come together is a system for checking labels, tags or QR codes on packaging. Anything can go wrong while labeling products. Labels or tags may contain incorrect, incomplete or misleading information (for example, an incorrect date or batch code), they may be poorly legible or contain misspellings or incorrect graphics. 

A 100% check is important here to ensure that the label also matches the contents of the bottle and that the product is made according to the Bill of Materials. If this is not the case, this could pose significant safety, health and claims risks in the storage, use or disposal of this product. Control should also prevent labels for different countries from ending up on the wrong shipment. After all, each country has its own specific laws and regulations regarding the information that must appear on labels.

In order to make the right analysis - a correct linking of the label to the product - the control system is linked to the ERP and MES system. This also offers the possibility of storing all approval and rejection data and using it for later analyses: when exactly did it go wrong and is it possible to find out what caused it so that it can be prevented in the future? The data can also be used for track & trace or maintenance purposes, for example, and of course it is interesting to have figures on the amount of products leaving the company and what the failure rate is.

More efficient and accurate

In addition to checking the content of the label, many other quality checks are possible with vision. For example, whether a label is stuck straight and properly and does not 'drift', whether a cap is present and properly in place, whether there is any form of contamination that makes the label unreadable and so on. All data can be forwarded to a dashboard as desired, allowing the user to see at a glance where possible problems may exist.

Tycho Scholtens, business developer vision at EKB: "By performing all these checks automatically, you can achieve significant benefits as a company. First of all, vision systems are many times faster than people. We are really not capable of assessing hundreds of products per minute during an entire working day. Nor with the accuracy that a vision system offers. In that respect, these systems completely disconnect quality control from employee competencies."

From standard to unique

The above is just one of many examples of the machine vision systems EKB supplies. In recent years many solutions have been developed whereby certain systems are now standard or can be delivered quickly with a small adjustment. Standalone or fully integrated into an existing situation.