After last year’s exciting talk we had the pleasure of having Achim Sonntag of Micro-Epsilon again for a talk. This time his talk was on automated detection of paint defects with the reflectCONTROL system.

He started with an introduction in the structure and work of the global acting company, Micro-Epsilon. Cooperations with different universities, for example the institute FORWISS at the University of Passau, are very interesting.

Besides their current orders, the main focus of the talk was reflectCONTROL, a roboter-based system to detect paint defects on cars. Manual control is a quality problem as the results are very subjective. The new system tries to lower the costs of the high effort by a standardized procedure. After the short view of the history of the system the so called defectometry was shown in detail. The system consists of a screen showing different patterns and cameras that capture the reflections on irregularities. The three roborts can be added to existing production lanes and are able to reduce the time for the checks to less than a minute with an accuracy of 98%. By this system, faults can be fixed faster and therefore quality rises.

Current development wants to not only find the faults but also to fix them in order to reduce the checking time.