Pallet Inspection

Structural defects in pallets, such as misaligned or missing support beams, can cause severe problems during the material handling task for which they are intended. Automatic inspection of assembled pallets with image-based 2D quality inspection is a though job because pallets consists of multiple layers of support beams. Using just 2D images it is therefore very difficult to disambiguate between the beams from different layers.

A 3D laser-triangulation system based on the Ranger camera series from Sick was conceived as the ideal solution to the inspection task at hand. Using this scanning system 3D models of the assembled pallets can be reconstructed. In these 3D models the different layers of support beams can be disambiguated after which the pallet can be easily inspected for missing or misaligned components. Since metric 3D measurements can be made the misalignments can be perfectly quantified.