Tae-Hyoung Park, Hwa-Jung Kim, and Nam Kim
International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems, vol. 4, no. 1, pp.96-104, 2006

Abstract : We propose a path planning method to improve the productivity of AOI (automated optical inspection) machines in PCB (printed circuit board) assembly lines. The path-planning problem is the optimization problem of finding inspection clusters and the visiting sequence of cameras to minimize the overall working time. A unified method is newly proposed to determine the inspection clusters and visiting sequence simultaneously. We apply a hybrid genetic algorithm to solve the highly complicated optimization problem. Comparative simulation results are presented to verify the usefulness of the proposed method.

Keyword : AOI machine, genetic algorithm, path planning, optimization, PCB assembly.