Customer Case: Enhancing Quality Control at OSTP with AI and Machine Vision
When you manufacture large, complex, made-to-order HVAC and building technology equipment, quality control is a critical – and often challenging – step. The size of the units and the level of customization make inspection slow and resource-heavy. We helped a Finnish equipment manufacturer solve this by moving their quality assurance from manual measurements to highly accurate automated inspection.
Initial situation: Manual measurements tied up resources and created risk for errors
Our customer manufactures HVAC and building technology equipment of various sizes directly to order. Previously, verifying that each finished unit matched the design drawings was done with the traditional “person and tape measure” approach.
This manual method created two major issues:
1. It tied up a lot of personnel in routine quality control tasks.
2. Measurement results were prone to human error and therefore unreliable, because accurate manual measurement of large units is extremely difficult.
The customer had a clear need for a solution that would make quality control reliable, faster, and less dependent on manual work.
Our solution: Intelligent 3D machine vision and scalable robotics
We designed and delivered an automatic measurement solution based on state-of-the-art 3D machine vision and robotics.
The intelligent system can detect deviations smaller than one millimetre in products that can be several metres long. The core of the solution is its ability to use the product’s CAD design models directly: the robot automatically navigates to the correct measurement points based on the drawings, which makes the solution fully scalable to products of different sizes and shapes.
Key outcomes for the customer
As a result of the collaboration, our customer achieved clear improvements in production:
- Extremely accurate and reliable 3D measurement: Uncertainty was removed, and product quality can now be verified with sub-millimetre accuracy.
- CAD-based scalability: The system adapts automatically to new product models without complex reprogramming.
- Significant savings in labour costs: Routine measurement work moved to the machine, freeing experts’ time for more value-adding tasks.
Towards automated quality assurance
This project demonstrates how combining 3D machine vision and robotics can solve some of the biggest efficiency challenges in traditional manufacturing. When tape measures are replaced with intelligent technology, you save time and money – and most importantly, you ensure that the product delivered to the customer is consistently on spec.
Are you struggling with measurement or quality control challenges for large parts or equipment? Get in touch with Advian’s experts, and we’ll design an intelligent solution that fits your production.
