Development of an FPGA-based Sealer Coating Inspection Vision System for Automotive Glass Assembly Automation Equipment

자동차 글라스 조립 자동화설비를 위한 FPGA기반 실러 도포검사 비전시스템 개발

In this study, an FPGA-based sealer inspection system was developed to inspect the sealer applied to install vehicle glass on a car body. The sealer is a liquid or paste-like material that promotes adhesion such as sealing and waterproofing for mounting and assembling vehicle parts to a car body. The system installed in the existing vehicle design parts line does not detect the sealer in the glass rotation section and takes a long time to process. This study developed a line laser camera sensor and an FPGA vision signal processing module to solve this problem. The line laser camera sensor was developed such that the resolution and speed of the camera for data acquisition could be modified according to the irradiation angle of the laser. Furthermore, it was developed considering the mountability of the entire system to prevent interference with the sealer ejection machine. In addition, a vision signal processing module was developed using the Zynq-7020 FPGA chip to improve the processing speed of the algorithm that converted the profile to the sealer shape image acquired from a 2D camera and calculated the width and height of the sealer using the converted profile. The performance of the developed sealer application inspection system was verified by establishing an experimental environment identical to that of an actual automobile production line. The experimental results confirmed the performance of the sealer application inspection at a level that satisfied the requirements of automotive field standards.