Opinion
Quality assurance in production ...
Quality assurance - or "QA" for short - is becoming increasingly important as the level of automation in industry increases. It serves to protect people, machines and products. After all, defects are not only expensive, but also dangerous. Comprehensive QA is therefore the basis for making product manufacture as efficient and cost-effective as possible. This requires various components and systems for measuring, testing and visualization. Image processing is a key pillar of QA. While QA systems used to be separate inspection stations, they are now directly integrated into production and an integral part of the manufacturing process; inspection is carried out inline and without any loss of time. In this issue, we dedicate a special to the topic of quality assurance from page 34. Among other things, we report on clamping units in an inspection system, sensor technology for dosing needle monitoring and piezoelectric sensors for monitoring industrial robots in assembly and handling processes. In two weeks' time, Control, the international trade fair for quality assurance, will be dedicated to precisely this topic: From May 7 to 10, 2019, the trade fair aims to show what users need for their quality assurance. I hope that the examples in this issue of handling will provide you with useful information for your workflows and control processes.
With best regards,
Petra Born
Editor-in-chief handling
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