In the last two decades, process monitoring for vehicle assembly has seen many changes. Infrequent manual sampling has been augmented by automatic, flexible but slow co-ordinate measurement machines, and 100% inline dedicated vision systems to monitor finished components, such as the body-in-white.
Recently, a new approach to 100% monitoring has been implemented with vision sensors distributed throughout the assembly line to provide true in-process monitoring. The distributed approach has been made possible by development of small, robust vision sensors, capable of being mounted right next to the weld guns, and networked, PC based data gathering and display technologies.