Problem / Objective

The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) mostly rely on manual inspection of the jobs produced in a batch where a few samples are randomly selected and checked manually. Accordingly, the entire batch is either rejected or accepted, which lacks effectiveness and increases the cost of production. In an initiative undertaken by the Centre of Excellence in Advanced Manufacturing Technology at IIT Kharagpur, researchers are on a mission to make AI & ML applications affordable for India’s industrial sector including MSMEs. This is manifested in a solution that can be leveraged for inspection of each job in a batch, in real-time, and at a very minimum cost.

Solution / Approach

The researchers at IIT-KGP have developed an innovative system consisting of a low-cost imaging device and an AI-enabled software for real-time metrological inspection. The developed system can be utilized in the production line to check the quality of the jobs and get instant results. This AI-enabled software will enhance the image quality captured by the low-cost camera at par with a high-quality camera output and process the image in real-time. Further, it automates the acceptance or rejection of production jobs and delivers the outcome for real-time managerial insights.

With an accuracy close to 98%, the solution can measure the dimensional features of the job, and also it can inspect the presence of scratches, dents, etc., in a job. It takes only approximately 12 seconds for the analyses to be complete. The accuracy check and timeliness of the solution have been guaranteed by testing it on different types of jobs. Researchers are working further to reduce the time.

Impact / Implementation

While India has been making fast inroads in the domain of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, it is the capital intensive and service industries which are able to put the applications to their vantage. The MSME sector, which employs more than 100 million people in the country contributing close to 30% of India’s GDP and 50% of export revenue, is still outside the ambit of industry-scale adoption of AI & ML. This is the gap which IIT Kharagpur aims to bridge while making low-cost Industry 4.0 solutions across all industrial sectors. A patent has been filed for the system and made available for MSMEs to license the technology.

Source: The KGP Chronicle

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