In the conventional visual inspection process, there were more and more challenges like no consistent criteria, no measurable result, a lack of flexibility, and higher labor costs. The AOI (automated optical inspection) system is gaining popularity during the defect inspection and quality assurance process.

Because of the mass customization demands of Industry 4.0, the production process must be capable of delivering low volumes with a high mix of customizations. Traditional robotic systems, with limited flexibility, will result in poor lead times and high maintenance effort and cost. The VGR (vision guided robotics) system powered by machine vision technology can be used to detect and recognize objects, calculate the position and orientation, and then guide the robot to complete the tasks. It significantly reduces the engineering effort while increasing flexibility and efficiency.

Quality control is a very important issue and machine vision provides a non-contact approach to measure the line, angle, circle, arc, diameter/radius and dimensions to help engineering teams improve quality and increase productivity.

Industry 4.0 and a growing reliance on big data are driving demand for quality assurance, traceability, and after-sales services across manufacturing sectors. There are many choices for ensuring traceability: RFID, barcodes, and characters. Due to the varied requirements of different production lines - dimensions, cost and longevity - 1D/2D barcodes and optical character recognition are becoming increasingly popular in identification applications for the manufacturing process.