Electrode sheet inspection machine - Ayaha Engineering

Automotive | Battery Production | Electric Components | 3D Vision
HALCON is used for web inspection of electrode sheet of lithium-ion battery used in hybrid cars.

For web inspection, a high resolution line scan camera is basically used. To stably process large images in high speed, a fast hardware processing such as by FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is needed. However, application development using FPGAs takes a lot of effort and time. This can be an obstruction against a customer's request. Therefore, powerful software processing for "time to market" is a trend in web inspection.

Ayaha Engineering, is one of the major web inspection machine manufacturers in Japan. Ayaha also uses mainly FPGA for multiple line scan cameras system. But for some systems, which have a small number of cameras, they use HALCON by MVTec to meet their customers' requests in time. As an example, their machine is used for inspection of electrode sheet, a material for lithium ion batteries which is essential for state-of-the-art electric vehicle technology. Continuous running of several thousand meters is needed in most production lines of electrode material. Thus, it is necessary to stabilize the infinite length running for a long time.

Screens showing inspected areas with different kind of defects.

In Ayaha's web inspection machine, only one line scan camera captures the electrode sheets which is coated by lithium. Then it inspects some factors such as coated width, defects, or foreign matters. The machine vision application is based on the HALCON software. HALCON's support vector machine (SVM) technology classifies the kind of defects. Defects have large variation for size, angle, intensity, shape, to name just a few. This defect classification using SVM is adopted as standard function of their machine.

HALCON's very fast region processing enables to process large data in time. Furthermore, the latest software features, e.g., defect classification increase the value of Ayaha's machine. Moreover, Ayaha significantly reduced the development time using HALCONs integrated development environment HDevelop. Thus, Ayaha realized a more flexible response to their customer's needs.

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