[chfritz]

Nice use case! Can you elaborate a bit more on robotics piece? What role does the robot play? I assume it's required to turn the part around for inspection. If so, how do you (automatically?) compute the grasping pointing? Also feel free to find me on LinkedIn if you want to chat more about growing a robotics businesses and/or geometric reasoning for manufacturing.

[lasermatts]

You nailed it - when the part comes out of the mold, it slides down a chute onto a conveyor belt. From here, the arms themselves change depending on the supplier (Kuka/Fanuc/Universal Robotics/Yaskawa...there are a lot of players in the space,) but they're all used to hold the part in the air so we can take images on all sides -- then the arm moves the part to its correct spot (good bin/bad bin)

for computing the grasping position -- your mileage may vary depending on which axis/face matters the most for an object (in an automotive part, you want to grasp the side that's not customer-facing because people care less about a scratch there) but it's a real challenge.

Luckily EtherCAT + protobuf's adoption has helped keep the comms integration low -- even a few years ago we'd need to make a weird hop from camera --> PLC --> arm but things are slowly getting easier