Granulate material sorting is a mature and well-developed topic, due to its presence in various fields, such as the recycling, mining, and food industries. However, sorting can be improved, and artificial intelligence has been used for this purpose. This paper presents the development of an efficient sorting system for transparent polycarbonate plastic granulate, based on machine vision and air separation technology. The developed belt-type system is composed of a transparent conveyor with an integrated vision camera to detect defects in passing granulates. The vision system incorporates an industrial camera and backlight illumination. Individual particle localization and classification with the k-Nearest Neighbors algorithm were performed to determine the positions and conditions of each particle. Particles with defects are further separated pneumatically as they fall from the conveyor belt. Furthermore, an experiment was conducted whereby the combined performances of our sorting machine and classification method were evaluated. The results show that the developed system exhibits promising separation capabilities, despite numerous challenges accompanying the transparent granulate material.

In recent years a lot of work has been done in the field of Deep Learning. With the launch of Industry 4.0, it is difficult for a company to stay relevant without implementing some sort of intelligent system. Big data, generated from a high variety of sensors, require elaborate systems which are able to distill useful information and make intelligent decisions. This paper presents a brief overview of Deep Learning techniques and provides some typical use cases from industry. Firstly, commonly used Deep Learning methods will be described, followed by a comparison between them. The significance of the Deep Learning techniques for Industry 4.0 is discussed further, and their application to problems in manufacturing. Finally, an overview of the current state-of-the-art object detection systems is presented, along with the future possibilities and potential development directions.

In industry, metal workpieces are often heat-treated to improve their mechanical properties, which leads to unwanted deformations and changes in their geometry. Due to their high hardness (60 HRC or more), conventional bending and rolling straightening approaches are not effective, as a failure of the material occurs. The aim of the research was to develop a predictive model that predicts the change in the form of a hardened workpiece as a function of the arbitrary set of strikes that deform the surface plastically. A large-scale laboratory experiment was carried out in which a database of 3063 samples was prepared, based on the controlled application of plastic deformations on the surface of the workpiece and high-resolution capture of the workpiece geometry. The different types of input data, describing, on the one hand, the performed plastic surface deformations on the workpieces, and on the other hand the point cloud of the workpiece geometry, were combined appropriately into a form that is a suitable input for a U-Net convolutional neural network. The U-Net model’s performance was investigated using three statistical indicators. These indicators were: relative absolute error (RAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), and relative squared error (RSE). The results showed that the model had excellent prediction performance, with the mean values of RMSE less than 0.013, RAE less than 0.05, and RSE less than 0.004 on test data. Based on the results, we concluded that the proposed model could be a useful tool for designing an optimal straightening strategy for high-hardness metal workpieces. Our results will open the doors to implementing digital sustainability techniques, since more efficient handling will result in fewer subsequent heat treatments and shorter handling times. An important goal of digital sustainability is to reduce electricity consumption in production, which this approach will certainly do.

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