Industries
Carpano Equipment, an Italian industrial company with a strong focus on innovation specializing in the production of welding systems, asked Eoptis to develop and produce a machine vision solution that would allow welders to remotely control the position of the torch in real time or check the welding result through clear visualization of the weld point (for both submerged arc and visible arc welding).
Using a camera to monitor the welding process offers multiple benefits. Firstly, it makes it easier to reach peripheral or difficult-to-reach points, often at great heights or inside pipes that are inaccessible to operators; it keeps operators away from dangerous positions; allows the operator to install multiple cameras to control the process and, from different angles, monitor the condition of the joint before welding and the quality of the weld bead after completion; it also gives the opportunity to save images and even videos. In general, a digital welding camera enables a tangible improvement in process efficiency and, above all, safety, benefiting both the workforce and the company.
Several challenges had to be overcome. The welding process involves a very intense, pulsed light source with uncontrollable timing; this light is dazzling, with high saturation to white; finally, between the two welding pulses there is total darkness, resulting in complete saturation to black. It was therefore necessary to develop dedicated real-time image processing algorithms for the camera, which in turn was equipped with special optical filters and a customized illuminator customized in both the emitted light color and beam aperture.
Eoptis based the software on HDR technology, well-known algorithms that prevent images from becoming saturated with white, black, or both. The software combines information from multiple images with different exposures to create an unsaturated image which, when combined with other non-saturated images, forms a smooth and continuous video stream.
Another challenge was to design the camera to operate in harsh environments, due to the presence of dust, sparks with jets of incandescent metal parts, high temperatures, etc. All this generated intensive R&D activity, which even led to an interesting thesis in telecommunications engineering.
Besides, the Eoptis solution helps the operator perform a high-quality weld (also checking how the weld bead turned out) and for the company to provide images of the work to its most demanding customers.
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