Visual Inspection

GlobalFoundries Fab 1 in Dresden is the largest semiconductor factory in Europe. Overhead Transportation Vehicles (OHV) transport the wafers in the clean room via the Automated Material Handling System located in production. As part of the Digital Product Factory, the Smart Systems Hub worked with various hardware and software partners to develop a solution that uses acoustic sensor technology and a newly created cloud infrastructure to detect anomalies in the chassis of these vehicles, thereby minimizing downtime and optimizing maintenance cycles.

To avoid possible failures of the transport systems, the project is being further enhanced by a team from ZEISS Digital Innovation. The team is developing software integrated into the cloud environment for this purpose, which uses cameras to identify further deviations and faults on the vehicles. With the help of this visual inspection, which analyzes camera images in real time on an industrial edge PC, important information such as the degree of wear and position deviations of the guide wheels or contamination can be detected.

This information is used to calculate an individual “health score” for each vehicle and a dashboard is used to automatically derive recommended actions for timely maintenance. All analysis data will be transferred to the existing Data Collection Kit in order to extend the machine learning algorithm accordingly..

In addition to the software component, the selection of suitable hardware components is also crucial. A conventional model-based computer vision approach combines geometric, photometric and statistical information. Image processing and fault detection run on an industrial edge PC connected to AWS cloud services. Communication with the cloud platform tracks the vehicles and enables connection to additional sensor data. That’s how an overall health value can be calculated for each vehicle.