Pharmacy

Each blister pack contained 5 vials of serum. Two machines were equipped with 2 In-Sight cameras. The vials passed along a conveyor where they were inspected by the cameras. In-Sight uses PatMax™, the powerful Cognex vision tool for part finding and localization to locate the units of serum so each individual vial can be inspected for impurities. Any impurities detected result in the rejection of the pack. All inspected vials were sent for packaging. The vision solution was fully integrated into the company's quality management system. The user friendly development environment in In-Sight Explorer proved beneficial, allowing a convenient user interface for programming vision tasks in addition to benefits such as

• Speed -10,000 bottles inspected per hour

• Elimination of defects reliably at high speed

• No false rejects

• Ease of use

After having worked with different vision suppliers, IPF chose Cognex vision systems for their robustness under industrial duress since the application demanded very high resolution vision in order to guarantee no impurities in the serum. When an impurity is as small as one square millimeter you need to know that the vision system you rely on can pick up traces this size. The speed of the 5603 and its ability to memorize inspections at the fastest line rates is remarkable and difficult to match.