Machine Vision Provides 100% Reliability for Product Lines

Cognex.Huhtamaki French company met with technical difficulties in providing packaging products for a well-known baby food manufacturer. After successfully using Cognex's machine vision products, they successfully overcome these problems.

Huhtamaki French is located in Auneau in the south of Paris and produces four types of packaging products for the food and beverage industry, including papermaking, extrusion, thermoforming, blow moulding, in-mold labelling and moulding fibres. The production challenge facing this paper involves the process of in-mold labeling.

Huhtamaki has production bases and sales outlets in 36 countries and employs more than 15,000 people. It is one of the largest consumer packaging products companies in the world. The company is a leader in hard plastic, paper and mold fiber packaging. The company’s customers include dairy, meat products and baby food producers. Huhtamaki supplies products for almost all areas of the food industry, including ice cream, baby food, vegetables and meat products. At the same time, Huhtamaki is also a member of the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) system and its production process must comply with strict food hygiene standards.

Each part of the baby food container is produced separately by Huhtamaki and then shipped to the customer for filling. Huhtamaki produces food containers in large quantities every day with great productivity. The transparent lid of the container is labeled with a label to indicate the ingredients and taste of the food. Huhtamaki must ensure that the label on the container shipped to the customer is error-free, but the earliest label supplier cannot ensure that the label in each batch is correct.

The risk is that the label may be confused and cause consumers to have an allergic reaction. Taking into account the stringent standards required by the market, Huhtamaki faced the challenge of ensuring zero error in the production process. This not only protects consumers but also preserves the reputation of Huhtamaki and its customers. It is not easy to achieve this goal without affecting production efficiency.

Each of the factory's production lines is fully automated, high-speed operation and very flexible. The production line operates around the clock, each line can produce different products, and any production method needs to be updated quickly.

Challenges and countermeasures

Given the characteristics of this challenge, the responsible person at Huhtamaki sought a machine vision system as a solution. Because manual inspection is not feasible under efficient production efficiency, machine vision systems can only be used.

Didier Lemaire, Technical Manager at Huhtamaki France, had previous experience with machine vision systems. Now he needs a faster and more powerful solution. After consulting, they started working with Caire, a Cognex-reliable integrator partner. Caire created a user interface for Huhtamaki when deploying the machine vision system, which not only ensures simple and easy-to-use features, but also provides convenience for future system upgrades. The solution must meet Huhtamaki's original decision to use the Cognex machine vision system.

In each production process, the two columns of conveyor belts are labeled with the same label to indicate the taste and composition of the food. The lid is 360. The continuous rotation of the angle increases the complexity of deploying a machine vision system. After labeling, the lid needs to be verified, packaged and shipped to the customer. To achieve the goal of error-free and full reliability, the system must be able to acquire and store a fairly detailed set of information so that zero error is possible.

The solution is both flexible and scalable for future changes to images, colors, and products. In addition, environmental conditions such as light and temperature will also change. The system is simple and easy to use, and can make simple changes to the program without affecting the reliability of the system.

100% reliable solution

Caire has extensive experience and deep expertise in using Cognex's visual product development solutions. The solution designed for Huhtamald is based on Cognex's InSight product. Cameras are installed on two conveyor belt production lines and the Huhtamaki interface is connected to a PC using OPC technology. Cognex's advanced vision tool, PatMax, provides a simple interface to clearly display product images. This plays a crucial role in identifying tags and obtaining images to be detected.

With PatMax, the program can store and recognize a text area, some parts of the label, and its position on the lid. This system does not require any complicated parameter settings, which ensures the system's easy-to-use features and long-term flexibility. Anything that does not match the captured image will be immediately removed. PatMax can store a large amount of detailed information, not only guaranteeing zero error, but its own error rate is almost negligible.

Due to the simplicity and reliability of the solution, Huhtamaki can guarantee the excellent quality of the product while ensuring high productivity. Not only that, the company is considering applying this technology to other production areas.

Source: Modern Packaging