I came across a thought about electronics industry. I believe the small electronic PCB manufacturers perform a lot of visual QA Inspection for missing components. This components(capacitors, resistors etc.) are so small that they need to be checked under microscope to make sure all the components are in place. This is very time consuming process as the cutting edge technology soldering machines have a very high through put and manual visual inspection is a very inefficient process to catch up with it and end up being an bottleneck of the process. I just made a very basic simulation of a robot picking up the PCB and inspecting it in front of a camera which can inspect all the components in a second using pattern recognition technology. This kind of automatic system takes only couple of seconds to inspect the PCB. The robot can be replaced with a 3 axis pneumatic or electric guides and it can be made pretty cheap. I am sure this is out there, but just wanted to post it on my blog. A very basic cheap application can be developed using cognex cameras and festo/smc actuators to accomplish with probably as little as less than 10,000 USD.
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