March 23, 2009 - Vision Components GmbH announces the VC Solar Positioner software library for camera-controlled production monitoring and quality assurance in solar wafer manufacturing. The library functions are highly optimized for wafer positioning tasks. Essentially, VC Smart cameras combined with the VCSolar Positioner software library presents a complete robot guidance solution. The integrated image processing system detects the position data and the camera reports the coordinates to the robot on the manufacturing line via a communication line, Ethernet or RS232 for example.The robot can carry out necessary adjustments based on the positional and rotational coordinates.
Due to more than 1/150 pixel accuracy, the camera systems provide consistent high precision, industry proven eye-arm coordination. Even with multiple regions or objects in the field of view, with one, two, four or even more wafer tiles in the field of view, the processing time remains under one second in all cases.Measurement accuracy and repeatability is unchanged even under difficult circumstances, such as damaged tile edges and instable uneven image background caused by changing lighting conditions.Object edges are sorted by strength and perpendicularity. Subsequently the smart camera classifies and assorts the connected edge segments automatically.
At last based on the found edges the center point and the orientation will be calculated with unparalleled high accuracy. The function library works with different smart camera models. Vision Components provides whole spectrum of smart camera families with own VCRT real-time, multitasking operating system, so customer can pick and match the best-fitting model for the application.
