Case Study - 3RT

3RT are an innovative company with a process where veneers from juvenile plantation trees are combined to produce a large, manufactured hardwood block that can produce wide hardwood boards. This material is a much more sustainable substitute to cutting down 100 year old native forests. 

Currently a human operator must visually assess each manufactured block to determine the quality of the product and assign a score. They must then manually record the score and adjust the production system to ensure the resulting blocks remain within the Quality Specification. This task must be done every 7-15 minutes and cannot be missed as it is a critical quality parameter and can impact the quality of future blocks. This is a labour-intensive process and depends on the subjective judgement of the operator. 

The Flinders Factory of the Future is developing a machine learning enabled computer vision solution to this problem by automatically assigning an objective quality score to the manufactured blocks. This will ensure a more repeatable and integrated manufacturing process, freeing up a human operator to do more complex and less repetitive tasks. This work is the foundation of achieving improved quality and increasing manufacturing capacity with the same resources, improving competitivity for interstate exports.

Researchers:

• Dr Russell Brinkworth