Glazing over inconsistencies in tile design
MONOTONE, an acronym for Automatic Quality Control for Industrial Printing, is an EU-funded project aiming at the modellisation of the decoration production line and its automation. The lack of predictability of product quality leads to high amounts of waste and to the production of overstock that must be discarded. For this reason, the project's objective is to develop a systematic way of production, thus enabling factories that lead in design to predict the final product of the design. Applied to the ceramic tile and textile industry sectors, MONOTONE developed a system for the automatic inspection of ceramic tiles using computer visual modality at various stages during the production process. That meant a ceramic line design at the basic level of automation including the selection of suitable sensors, integration of these sensors on a low-level network and selection of suitable actuators. This line is capable of detecting colour and/or texture defects on ceramic tile surfaces. By doing so, it can determine the cause of the defect generation. The automation of the line may have significant benefits, such as lower material waste and lower energy consumption. In addition, the higher repeatability of the products facilitates the just in time production and allows production in smaller batch sizes. The resultant knowledge of the weakness and strengths of the process and the benefits it brings in terms of lower cost of production renders the application of the automation an attractive investment. All that is left is for the ceramic industry to exploit the application of this result in order to automate the glazing line, or even proceed to further improvement.
