PCO AG has developed the Turbo Inspector, a mobile inspection system that resides in a special case, has its own energy supply via storage batteries, and can be transported and implemented directly at the suspected source of error.
Discovering disruptions is often not easy, especially if a fast production process is involved, and the human eye is forced to capitulate – such as in paper production. With brisk speeds of around 33 metres per second, the paper webs whip through rolling mills and press works, over drying cylinders, through the calendar and, finally, onto the bearing rolls. What can happen in this situation is that something gets stuck or the machines don’t run smoothly. In such cases, the observational capacity of a technical specialist on-site is insufficient because a human being can only differentiate up to 16 individual pictures per second. On the other hand, the artificial eye of the Turbo Inspector can achieve more than 1000. The Turbo Inspector case contains a heavy-duty, 10-Bit CMOS camera, the pco.1200 hs.
At a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels the nimble eye inspects at 636 images per second, and in VGA-resolution even 1357 images, all without any trouble. Up to 4Gb of storage capacity is available, and the camera communicates via a FireWire interface (IEEE 1394) with an integrated tablet PC in the case as the processing unit.
