Automating the optical identification of abrasive wear on electrical contact pins

Abstract

Abstract The automation of quality control in manufacturing has made great strides in recent years, in particular following new developments in machine learning, specifically deep learning, which allow to solve challenging tasks such as visual inspection or quality prediction. Yet, optimum quality control pipelines are often not obvious in specific settings, since they do not necessarily align with (supervised) machine learning tasks. In this contribution, we introduce a new automation pipeline for the quantification of wear on electrical contact pins. More specifically, we propose and test a novel pipeline which combines a deep network for image segmentation with geometric priors of the problem. This task is important for a judgement of the quality of the material and it can serve as a starting point to optimize the choices of materials based on its automated evaluation.