Siemens Rastatt, well-known for its highly automated facility, boasts a continually growing product variety. As a part of Siemens Building Products, the Rastatt site specializes in producing components for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, which are commonly found in residential and commercial spaces. Many of these products are safety-critical, meaning that impeccable quality standards are a core priority for Siemens Rastatt, therefore placing high demands on their visual inspection systems – high demands that must be met.

The ever-growing product variety at Siemens Rastatt made it difficult to scale conventional visual quality inspection systems. Complex implementation and calibration efforts consumed valuable time and energy when implementing vision jobs for new product variants. False negatives – and thereby time wasted on troubleshooting defects that in fact were not there – were unavoidable, because images of all possible defect types were not available. Consequently, the conventional visual inspection systems used at Siemens Rastatt slowed down their test engineers; a no-go in a “high-mix, high-volume” factory.