Inspection of Lubricant Application on Automotive Assemblies

Challenge

In automated automotive production lines, lubricating grease is applied to individual assembly components before final mounting. The correct amount and precise positioning of the lubricant are essential to ensure smooth assembly processes and reduce component wear.

To address this challenge, senswork implemented a vision-based inspection to reliably verify the presence and positional accuracy of lubricant application directly within the production process. The key requirement was to create a stable inspection method capable of distinguishing the lubricant clearly from the surrounding metallic surfaces.

Solution

The solution combined a specialized illumination setup with polarizing filters to significantly enhance the visual contrast between the lubricating grease and the background material. By reducing reflections and unwanted glare from metallic surfaces, the system enabled a highly contrasted representation of the grease application area, allowing the inspection software to detect even subtle variations with high reliability.

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Results

This optical setup provided process-stable evaluation that remained consistent despite changes in ambient lighting or surface reflections. In addition to improving detection accuracy, the system enabled completely non-contact measurement, eliminating any risk of contaminating the lubricant during inspection. The result was an efficient quality assurance process that ensured sufficient and positionally accurate lubricant while supporting high production throughput.

Would you like to read more about machine vision for the automotive industry? Learn more here.