Automotive Gearbox Seals

This system ensures that a gearbox seal has been "pulled" (correctly positioned) during the manufacture of a van. If this seal is not pulled, the gearbox oil will leak out, leading to a catastophic gearbox failure after about 1000 miles for which the manufacturer is responsible .

The system locates the seal within the camera image, and then measures the exposed width. If there is insufficient seal visible (i.e. the seal has not been pulled), the production line is stopped and an alarm sounded.

This task is complicated by the fact that there are many different variants of van, each of which have different pipe and component configurations.
In some cases these pipes can partially obscure the target seal so the image processing software has to be very carefully constructed in order not to keep stopping the vehicle production line.

In this case an intelligent camera was chosen as the hardware solution since this better suited the working environment.
This was mounted over the top of the production line with enough protection to ensure that it could not be interfered with by inquisitive personnel.