Bluewrist

The company’s computer vison R&D team provides all the algorithms and methodology, the library Bluewrist relies on (they build their own custom library for inspection processes) while their application engineering team consists of PLC experts, mechanical experts, and automation experts to help design or retrofit projects for customers. When customers arrive with their projects, this team will see the requirements and work with R&D to determine feasibility. Bluewrist takes a rigorous scientific approach for all projects so that what the customer wants is feasible with today’s technology and software capabilities. Another key component of their job is customer education. The typical Bluewrist customer (if there is such) has never implemented an automated 3D vision project from start to end, so setting the right expectations is crucial. For Bluewrist, the job is ultimately a balance between speed and quality.

The Hi Tech Marketing Guy

The Bluewrist marketing and communication manager is Jason Niu, a University of Toronto grad who majored in marketing and economics but parlayed his deep technical background and passion for technology products into gigs at AMD, ATI, and Canon prior to joining Bluewrist. “I began my tech career focusing on ink jet printers which led to photography, and video,” Niu recalls. “To process images with more pixels or higher resolution, you need better computers. It all snowballed for me and became the driving force behind my interest in tech because I’m always interested in what’s on the horizon, the next greatest thing. I’ve spent almost a decade in the semi-conductor, hi tech space and now I’ve moved on to another booming industry, industrial automation.”

At Bluewrist, the next greatest thing is often driven by customer demand and according to Niu, those customers, on average, come in two types. The first is starting a manufacturing facility from the ground up, setting up a new plant, and in need of various robotic solutions like robot guidance which instructs the robots to perform specific repetitive tasks. “We help with the guidance,” he says, “and we also marry vision sensors to the robot, enabling it to perform even more complicated tasks such as assembly, loading, or product inspection. In addition, we provide the software infrastructure to enable various industrial devices to communicate with one another.” Because building a modern, automated factory means dealing with a lot of industrial peripherals like PLC, controllers, and sensors, those must be centrally managed. Bluewrist produces the software which enables the programming and ultimately allows the customer to set up a new factory.

Niu says that the second type of customer is well established within an existing facility, but running older equipment in dire need of an upgrade. “We go in and take a look at what they do,” says Niu, “and because our software is hardware independent, we can use it to raise capabilities with minimal disruption to their existing operations.” He also admits that there are definite overlaps between the two types of customers. “Every customer is unique. Everybody makes different products,” says Niu. ”On the other hand, sometimes we have a customer that is creating ten production lines to make the same thing, so every line is pretty much identical. When you talk about different customers, they are usually in different industries with different products, so there are different challenges. But overall, the challenges are often the same.”

All the software applications used by Bluewrist are their own—created in-house and custom. In citing an example, Niu points to a welding video in which the challenge is to maintain the adequate cycle time speed in order to accomplish real-time weld inspections. “A lot of the welding is automated by high speed robots,” he says. “They have a 3D laser profile scanner that will track the weld pattern and our software actually generates a third point cloud off of that pattern and compares that to the weld specs. We do real-time comparison to ensure that there are no gaps, cracks, or other weld defects. So when we deal with a customer like this, we really have to see what the weld speed is. Our software is highly scalable based on the hardware you use to support it. You can scale anywhere from 2 to 22 CPU cores, or as many CUDA cores as you can throw at it.”

Niu admits that sometimes Bluewrist is limited by the customer’s budget, as well as power constraints. For example, a customer cannot install a powerful a system on their shop floor because the environment is simply too harsh. In this instance, Bluewrist conducts a lot of internal benchmarking and simulations to determine the optimum sweet spot between the number of CUDA cores and CPU cores, as well as meeting the customer’s speed requirement. “In addition to that, we do our own in-house testing and simulation and run it with various system configurations or with different hardware capabilities to at least match the customer requirements,” says Niu. “So this is our workflow: we take it apart, we do our simulation, feasibility study, and determine the ultimate hardware specifications needed for this project.”

Niu admits that determining the specifications is a challenge, but also one of the easier ones. With the availability of multi-core CPUs and powerful GPUs, Bluewrist’s options are extremely broad. Other key challenges include the accuracy needed, but Niu says that is a whole different discussion. “We always have to balance accuracy and speed,” he says. “You can achieve really accurate scans but you’re dealing with a huge amount of data that will overload even the most powerful system. We have to find a sweet spot in terms of accuracy. With weld inspection, we’re accurate up to 0.1 mm and that’s good enough because welding is typically not that intricate. We’re looking for brazen defects like burn throughs or missing welds which are easy to locate. It’s just a balance of many factors, but ultimately, it boils down to this: Can this be put into a production system? Can we meet the customer’s requirement 24/7? Many factory operations run 24/7.”

A Clear Cut Decision

For years, the Bluewrist relied on industrial grade PCs, but as inspection processes became more complex (incredibly dense point clouds and higher resolution cameras), the need for processing within a small form factor increased dramatically. Traditional industrial PCs could no longer offer the required level of performance, so Bluewrist began researching alternatives, focusing on form factor, support, and reliability. All roads led to BOXX. Niu even had a ringing endorsement from Adam Glick, a onetime AMD coworker and former BOXXlabs engineer. “Because BOXX is designed, manufactured, and supported in the U.S., we really needed that level of North American support and good service just in case things went wrong—because things always go wrong in manufacturing,” he laughs. “It’s a given factor that things will go wrong, so it’s what you do afterwards that’s the deciding factor of a good or bad service provider. We came to BOXX because their incredibly flexible hardware configurations allow us to scale any number of cores up to the socket limitations.”

This push to move to BOXX was spurred by a specific project. It seems Bluewrist had an extremely challenging project involving one of the top three Japanese OEMs, a company which had an existing type of cell that after two years of trying, they still could not get to work. So they brought it to Bluewrist.

“A lot of our hardware had to be compatible with the existing hardware,” Niu recalls, “and there’s really not much of a physical space for us to work with inside of a control cabinet. There was a lot of stuff—relay switches, power supplies, PLCs, you name it, so we could not use a full-size, industrial strength PC because there was not enough airflow. Secondly, it would not be powerful enough. Only the BOXX APEXX 1* had the small physical size and processing power combination to make this project work.” Bluewrist software developers and engineers conducted performance analysis to determine the best possible hardware configuration and the optimum number of CUDA cores necessary, “It involves the inspection of over sixty different screws and fasteners on a door panel, so we were dealing with a lot of data under ten seconds,” he says. “The APEXX 1 form factor does not exist outside of BOXX, so it was a clear cut decision.”

Internal analysis clearly demonstrated that the BOXX system would deliver the necessary performance, so Bluewrist contacted BOXX MPD Performance Specialist Scott Campbell. They asked some straightforward questions regarding scalability and hardware configurations and came away impressed with Campbell’s knowledge and customer service. “We could spec out the system, but it was Scott who made sure the system was built as soon as possible. Because they were so custom, we really needed to test the performance.” Niu says. The portable powerhouse quickly passed all performance tests and was soon put to work on the project. “Our customer was very impressed when he saw that tiny workstation running that whole cell,” Niu recalls. “The cell basically has a robot arm with two cameras mounted on it and the APEXX 1 is the brains behind it all.”.