A Design Study On Flexible Vibratory Feeding System Based On HALCON Machine Vision

Vibratory feeder, thanks to its excellent storage material, workpiece orientation, and continuous feeding characteristics, is widely used in high-volume automated manufacturing of machinery, electronics, food, pharmaceutical and other fields. With the increasing requirements on small-volume, customized and personalized manufacture, traditional vibratory feeder’s shortcomings in terms of flexibility, versatility, design and manufacturing cycle become even more prominent. Machine vision is a technology used to identify the characteristics of the target by real-time image processing. Thanks to its flexibility, reliability, and short development cycle, machine vision is widely used in industrial robots, defect detection, target tracking and other fields. Therefore, instead of mechanical structure used in traditional orientation, this paper proposes a new method to judge the orientation and motion state of the target by integrating machine vision technology to vibratory feeding technology.This paper mainly focuses on the vibratory feeding technology and machine vision technology. The study on traditional vibratory feeder mainly focuses on its structural design, mechanical orientation design, and trays coating. On this basis, a machine vision inspection systems consists of suitable light source, camera, lens, and image processing program is designed, and a flexible vibratory feeding system based on machine vision is built by combining the machine vision inspection systems with a pneumatic actuator controlled by microprocessor. MVTec’s HALCON software is selected as the image processing software development platform in this paper. Also, through applying image smoothing filtering, morphological analysis, template matching, and choosing Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 as development environment, a Windows application based on C++ is developed. The application controls the actuators by communicating with the microcontroller, and the communication uses serial port. Finally, corresponding experiments are conducted to verify the flexible vibratory feeding system. For workpiece orientation cannot be achieved or is not easy to achieve in traditional vibratory feeder, we select typical parts to do orientation experiments and monitor the real-tima speed of the workpiece on the platform consist of machine vision and vibratory feeding system, and the experimental results are promising.