Quality inspection at Poppies

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By Gilles Moerman, Project Engineer at Vintecc, Creator of Smarter Machines

Our competences

Machine Vision
Optical Sorting
Data analysis

The quality control system met all predefined targets. On top, our data logging platform Capture registers all quality data and sends out condensed quality statistics.

Gilles Moerman

Project Engineer Vintecc, Creator of Smarter Machines

Data Collection, Machine Vision, Optical Sorting, Pointcloud Processing, Smart Machines

Poppies, based in Ypres (Belgium), is a global company specialised in the production of quality snacks and desserts for true gourmets. Achieving a constant high quality output is key for the company.

The problem

Brownies are marvellous cookies. They should also look perfect in shape. Poppies, producing brownie cookies strives for this type of perfection, not only in taste, but also in shape. Therefore, cookies with an imperfect shape (amount of cracks, depth of cracks, length, bulge volume …) should be filtered out. Poppies asked Vintecc to build a quality control system that could do that. The challenge for us was not only getting perfect, high resolution data, but also processing it at an amazing speed.

The solution

To process the data at this rate a specialised sensor was selected and integrated. The sensor is able to scan at a rate of 1500 Hz giving us a pointcloud of each cookie with a precision of 0.8 mm. To process these pointclouds for the quality control, we used different machine vision techniques to highlight cracks, bulges and to check the dimensions of the brownies. Finally a bad brownie was removed with a pneumatic ejector.

Results

This intensive collaboration led to a performant quality control system which met all predefined targets. On top, our data logging platform Capture registers all quality data and sends out condensed summaries of the quality statistics every last x hours.