Fault Tolerant Control of an Industrial Manufacturing Process Using Image Processing

This paper proposes a fault-tolerant control technique, for industrial applications, based on image processing. It is known that, sensor faults disturb the normal sequences of manufacturing operations. This causes a serious delay in the manufacturing process, or even it terminated for maintenance. Cameras with ad-hoc video and image processing algorithms can be used to detect and track objects, thus they can play the role of sensors in industrial application. The proposed technique uses visual information, collected by cameras, to raise the fault-tolerant of the manufacturing system. The visual information is used to generate a redundant sensing signal to substitute the faulty-sensor signal in case of faults. The main advantages of the proposed technique are: the continuity throughout the manufacturing process as well as the detection and isolation of faulty-sensors. The proposed technique was applied to a real production line model to illustrate its performance.