Teaching highly reflective parts with Robotiq wrist camera

mikebeauchemin

Hi pros,

I had to teach a small highly reflective part with our wrist camera during a demo for a customer.  

As you can imagine the part was hardly recognizable by the camera because of the chrome finish of the part.  Since it was impossible to paint parts in the production process of the customer; I had to find another workaround to teach that part.  I've applied on the part some spray developer powder that welders are using to find cracks on welds.  Good thing is that it's easy to remove afterward and creates a white mat finish on the part.

 

It was then easy to teach the part with our camera.  Once taught & after cleaning the part, question was to see if that would help the camera to locate the same part contour while it's back to its natural state of chrome finish.  


As you can observe on the picture,  I was able to get a good level of part detection (80%) on the reflective parts after teaching it with the mat powder finish. That's a simple workaround turns out to be a proven way to teach reflective parts. 

Have you face this type of challenge on high reflective parts?  How did you manage it?

Sebastien

@mikebeauchemin
Any plans for Robotiq to add quick changing filters or color LED on the camera? That would allow us to have more flexibility to control the environment like reflections and lighting?

Etienne_Samson

@Sebastien there is no such plan on the short term. Maybe @JeanPhilippe_Jobin will have more to tell you on this topic!

Matt_H

Have you tried backlighting the part?
the camera would then see the image as negative. and very little reflection.

chriskearsley

backlight the part and  turn of the led turn down the exposure helps, I will post a short video next week how we are overcoming looking for shiny parts

chriskearsley

Here's a few pictures what I  have been working on, to overcome shiny parts and shiny basket it picks from



 Sheltered the light from above


This is the 1st cam locate for the 1st layer, it has a separator between the layers, this was up lighting red, turning led off, turning the white balance rgb to max and lowering the exposure.



I had to change the light to blue as the bottom layer has parts but also has a shiny bottom to the basket


here is the cam locate it didn't pick one up but i will get it to find it with edge detection tweaks