Project Overview
At the manufacturing plant of an electric motor producer, we implemented a vision-guided robotic picking cell to feed primary motor components—stators and rotors—into the pre-assembly line.
Because stators and rotors arrive on wide conveyors and pallet trays with arbitrary orientation, the robot required dynamic positional guidance rather than fixed waypoints.
The ANAVIS machine vision system acts as the “eyes of the robot”, enabling it to perceive part offsets and adjust pick trajectories dynamically.
Large Field of View & Part Variability Challenge
Components arrive with loose spacing and variable rotational angles. Using hardcoded robotic paths resulted in:
- Off-center gripping, causing surface scratches on copper coil windings,
- Dropping expensive precision laminations,
- Downstream feeder jams that stalled the automated assembly cycle.
The robot needed to perceive true spatial coordinates on every single cycle.
The ANAVIS Solution: 1 mm Accuracy across a 120 × 80 cm Workspace
We engineered a 2D machine vision positioning system overseeing the entire conveyor and tray staging area.
The vision processor calculates the precise centroid (X, Y) and rotational angle of stators and rotors in real time. The robot utilizes these offsets to align its vacuum/clamping gripper perfectly with the component before contact.
The standout technical achievement was maintaining 1 mm spatial accuracy across a large 120 × 80 cm field of view.
How the System Works
- 01 Component Inflow: Stators and rotors enter the 120 × 80 cm pick zone on palletized trays.
- 02 Wide-Area Imaging: Overhead industrial cameras capture high-resolution images under diffuse LED lighting.
- 03 1 mm Center & Yaw Extraction: Pattern-matching algorithms compute the exact centroid and orientation.
- 04 Data Transmission: Corrected coordinates are transferred instantly to the robot controller.
- 05 Precision Approach: The robot gripper navigates directly to the calculated center.
- 06 Damage-Free Transfer: The component is picked cleanly without touching delicate windings and placed onto the assembly indexer.
