Scorpion Vision has prevented a huge storm in a teacup after ensuring the UK population is supplied with its daily cuppa during the current crisis.
The Hampshire-based company sprang into action last week to deliver essential maintenance to one of the UK’s biggest tea-producers – and prevent a total halt of the production line.
Despite the country being in lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak, Scorpion Vision rectified the issue remotely to have the 3D vision de-palletising system back up and running within a short space of time.
It is only the second time in six years that Scorpion Vision has been called into action since installing the Scorpion Stinger system that enables two-metre high pallets of tea to be de-palletised. The system, which has picked 1.62m sacks since installation, uses 2D image data and 3D point cloud which enables a robot to accurately pinpoint each sack of tea, even if it has moved during transit.
Scorpion Vision CEO Paul Wilson said: “We had a call that the system had stopped, which had them in a bit of panic as they can’t make their products until the tea has come off the pallet.
“Taking the tea off the pallet, given the height and weight of the sacks, is a health and safety issue as well.
“We were able to identify the problem remotely, one of the PCs had failed, so we fixed the hard drive reinstalled the app and they were up and running in no time at all, which ensured the tea production was virtually uninterrupted.
“If it had taken a site visit, you were looking at a down time of a couple of days, so the company were very relieved.”
The speed was also helped by the company having a system maintenance contract with Scorpion Vision – which not all who install their vision systems take out.
“We’ve only had two issues with this system in six years – so it is very reliable – but they still take out a maintenance contract with us, for eventualities like this because of how important it is for their business to be operational 24/7.
“A lot of the companies we install systems with don’t take up the option – and so if something does go wrong – we do our utmost to help, but those who have taken out the contract have us at their disposal the minute an error occurs.”
