Does 3D machine vision answer the call of 24/7 medical kitting?
Super-high volumes, ultra-fast cycle times, and an almost limitless variety of small products for picking, medical kitting presents automation engineers with a stringent set of demands. CapSen Robotics turned to the Zivid Two camera to provide the 3D sensing accuracy the application demands.
Medical product kitting presented the CapSen PiC robotic solution with two significant and competing requirements. On the one hand, it demanded very high-resolution image capture and processing, while on the other it also needed to ensure ultra-fast cycle times.
Mark Stevens, Director of Business Development at CapSen Robotics explained, “The sheer number of different medical products that could be picked from a bin and placed within a carton is truly vast, anything from pipettes, syringes and swabs to medicines in packets, tubes or bottles.”
“We realised early in the project then that we needed a 3D machine vision camera that was capable of providing us with a trueness in point cloud data that would enable us to more accurately differentiate, pick and place the widest possible range of medical products — irrespective of size, shape or material.”
At the same time, medical kitting cells need to work really fast. Many will operate on a continuous basis and product pick rates are measured in 10s of millions rather than 10s of thousands per annum. Adherence to stringent cycle times was therefore vital.
“The Zivid Two 3D camera provides our CapSen PiC vision and motion planning software with both the image resolution and the image capture time it needs to achieve the fast, ultra-fine manipulation that’s demanded in the most difficult of piece-picking applications. There really is no compromise between the two aspects, the camera’s image trueness is staggering.”
Thanks to the Zivid Two camera’s artifact reduction technology, native colour operation and high dynamic range, the CapSen solution is able to pick and place a wide variety of medical products, whether they be matt, glossy, semi-transparent or plastic wrapped.
In long-term proving trials, this state-of-the-art medical kitting demonstration has operated error-free 24/7, and CapSen is confident of its ability to reliably pick many millions of different medical products per year.
CapSen is now considering the adaptation of the solution to address the larger scale challenge of de-palletizing in a similar fast throughput production environment.
At a socio-economic level, the solution also addresses an issue of rising significance across a range of sectors. Where the kitting price point is low and/or the volumes are so high, finding the human resources to operate manually on a three-shift, 365 days per year basis is increasingly unlikely…
Automated kitting systems like CapSen Robotics’ provide a fast, hygienic and error-free solution with an attractively short ROI, one that enables human resources to be better deployed in less strenuous and more value-adding tasks.
