Building a Cognex vision inspection cell for an aerospace fastener manufacturer with 100% traceability
A Tier-2 aerospace fastener manufacturer in Pinellas County with an AS9100D quality system and three precision turning lines feeding a single packaging operation. Customer base: airframe primes and engine MROs across the southeast.
Industrial Automation
Cognex · Universal Robots · Banner
The problem
The customer's existing inspection process was a manual gauge-and-eyeball check on a 1-in-25 sample basis, with the rest going through on a process-capability assumption. Two recent customer audits flagged sampling-only inspection as a risk against the AS9100D rev D requirements being phased in. A third audit specifically called out a need for documented 100% inspection on a critical thread length dimension.
Throughput on the line averaged 14,400 parts per shift on the high-volume SKUs — far too many to inspect by hand at 100%. The existing optical comparator setup ran at 11 seconds per part. A typical 8-hour shift's output would have required 44 hours of inspection.
“The auditor used our cell logs as the example for the rest of our supplier base.”
What we did
We engineered a vision inspection cell built around two Cognex In-Sight 9912 cameras (one OD, one thread-profile), a UR5e cobot to handle part presentation and reject sortation, and a Banner safety light curtain. The cell takes a part from the existing parts feeder, presents it at two stations sequentially, and either passes it to packaging or drops it to a reject chute. Inspection time per part: 1.4 seconds. Pass-through rate: matches line speed with margin.
We wrote the inspection logic in Cognex In-Sight Explorer with custom scripts for thread-profile validation against the AS9100D-specified gauge file. Every part's image and pass/fail decision is logged to a SQL database with serial number and timestamp, generating the documented traceability the customer's auditors specifically asked for.
The result
The cell achieved 100% inspection at line speed without slowing throughput. Pass-rate on the OD dimension came in at 99.94%; thread-profile pass-rate at 99.91%. The customer passed their AS9100D recertification audit on first submission with the cell logs cited as a compliance positive. They've since added two more cells on adjacent lines.
Components used
- In-Sight 9912 vision systems (qty 2) Cognex
- UR5e collaborative robot Universal Robots
- EZ-SCREEN safety light curtain Banner
- Custom presentation fixtures (Adams shop-built)
- SQL-backed traceability database (Adams-developed)
