The problem

Brownies are marvellous cookies. They should also look perfect in shape. Poppies, producing brownie cookies amongst others, 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 just 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

The 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.