Online Inspection System

This online inspection system was developed for the textile industry. The system uses COTS hardware and was originally designed to run on the QNX 4 operating system. The system continuously collects and analyses data from sensors that measure critical manufacturing properties like the relative amount of finish on yarn (FOY) and spinning tension. The system can easily sample one inch at a spinning rate of 5,000 meters per minute.

The system uses a distributed architecture that scales easily and can handle a virtually unlimited number of inputs without impacting performance. The number of distributed processors depends upon the number of thread lines to be monitored, the number of sensors per thread line and the sampling rate. A central controller oversees the entire network of distributed processors.

The software has extensive real-time capabilities that perform statistical analysis and out-of-limits detection. The system can be adapted to other applications with similar requirements-namely, high-speed monitoring of a large number of inputs.