Visual location system for placement machine based on machine vision

Placement machine is the most critical equipment of SMT (Surface Mount Technology). Using visual location technology in its pick and place process can offer a high speed and precision component placement. This paper presents a visual location system based on machine vision for the placement machine. It begins with an introduction of placement machine and then describes the design and implementation of the visual location system. In the system, two key techniques are completed by secondary development based on VisionPro. One is accurate image location that is solved by the pattern-based location algorithms of PatMax. The other one, camera calibration, is achieved by image warping technology through the checkerboard plate. Moreover, this system can give good performances such as high image locating accuracy with 1/40 sub-pixels, high anti-jamming, and high-speed location of objects whose appearance is rotated, scaled, and/or stretched.