Pirelli was awarded the Oscar Masi Award for industrial innovation 2016, organized by AIRI, the Italian Association for Industrial Research. The prestigious award, whose theme this year is "innovative processes or products in line with the intelligent manufacturing of the future", was presented today at the National Research Council in Rome to Pirelli researchers, led by Ing. Gianni Mancini and Dr. Vincenzo Boffa, who have been working on the "CVA Prototype: Automatic Visual Check of the Tire" project for four years.
It is an automatic finished product analysis system that makes use of innovative artificial vision and automation technologies. For the development of this project, the Pirelli researchers started from an observation: one of the most highly specialized but also the most repetitive tasks in the manufacturing process of an industrial product is the visual control of the product's quality.
To date, this operation is carried out manually and consists in observing all the internal and external areas of all the tires produced, checking with great accuracy the existence of any visual defects. This check is then followed by automatic instrumental checks. However, the manual visual inspection poses a series of critical issues related to the repetitiveness of the operations, the difficulty of analyzing the tyres, the complexity of the details to be detected in a time which must in any case be short and compatible with the pace of industrial production, which up to today only the "technology" of human vision has managed to guarantee.
And here we understand the truly innovative scope of the CVA project, which earned Pirelli the award of the Oscar Masi Award. Indeed, the objective of the CVA is to overcome the current manual control of tire quality by mechanising the visual inspection process through the introduction of technologies based on artificial vision.
The CVA is a cutting-edge system that combines fully automated mechanics with the use of high-resolution and high-speed vision systems. These are computerized systems that manage vision algorithms specially developed to process a large amount of data collected by the vision system for each tyre, in accordance with the mechanical cycle time. The CVA is able to automatically recognize new tire models or changes in the layout of the lettering on the sidewall; it works without interruption and is flexible, as it has to respond to the high variability of the product (such as alternation of summer-winter tyres, all seasons or super low profile) and to the extensive range of different sizes that make up a product line.
Pirelli has developed the algorithms necessary for image processing and the consequent identification of defects. These algorithms, frontier of artificial vision, are able to identify any defects in each area of the tire, guaranteeing the necessary answers. The project, born in the heart of Pirelli research and development, i.e. in the Milan Bicocca R&D laboratories, was developed with the collaboration of important university institutions such as the Department of Computer Science - Science and Engineering of the University of Bologna and the Department of of the Turin Polytechnic, proof of Pirelli's growing support for the world of Italian research. Marco Tronchetti Provera, CEO of Pirelli, declared: “I thank AIRI and Prof. Renato Ugo for having assigned the prestigious OSCAR MASI 2016 award to the Pirelli Group. The Pirelli CVA Project - Automatic Visual Control - which is being awarded today, has the objective of overcoming the manual visual control process through the introduction of innovative technologies based on artificial vision and the most advanced automation, and has been implemented by our researchers ahead of the competition. The acknowledgment assigned to Pirelli today is a stimulus for our researchers to create ever more advanced solutions, it is a stimulus for the Group to continue its research effort in collaboration with the most prestigious Universities and Research Centers, and it is stimulus for the country to increasingly consider research as a driving force for innovation and growth”.
