An EPSRC Industrial CASE Award was allocated through the Integrated Products Manufacturing KTN to Shelton Vision Systems and the Mechatronics Research Centre at Loughborough University. The award was for research into 'high-accuracy laser cutting of lace'.
Summary of project
The scalloping of decorative lace involves the removal of a backing mesh from the main lace pattern. This process traditionally involves the use of a mechanical cutting system that is slow and laborious.
An automatic machine capable of cutting lace with a laser driven by machine vision was developed at Loughborough University during the 1990's. This technology is being exploited by Shelton Vision Systems. The focus of this work is to develop the next level of technology and has centred around developing a machine vision system that can identify individual fibres along the cutting path and cut them with high accuracy using a pulsed laser.
A manual fibre targeting system has been developed and has showed that using a high accuracy pulsed laser gives a much better cut edge quality over the existing continuous laser beam. A machine vision system has been developed that can identify individual lace fibres and track them to the point to be cut. Thermal modelling has been used to investigate the amount of laser energy that is needed to cut each fibre.
Image grabbed at high resolution with an area-scan camera. Images then processed using WiT and MS Visual C++.