In response to the market’s need for luxurious automobile interiors, automotive parts makers are developing various types of crash pads to give drivers a sense of emotional luxury. In particular, a low-cost and high-quality crash pad manufacturing technology is being developed for mid- to low-priced vehicles, namely, the IMG-S (In Mold Grain-pre Stitch) technology. High defect rate of stitching is a critical problem during the manufacture of crash pad using the IMG-S technology. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a method of real-time machine vision inspection of stitches on the automotive crash pad. This paper presents the real-time machine vision inspection system configuration, proposes stitch and reference line detection methods, and method for calculating the distance between stitches and the reference line. According to the distance between the stitch and the reference line, the status of the stitch was judged as normal, warning, or erroneous, and the final result was displayed on the user interface. The applicability of the proposed real-time machine vision inspection method was verified by stitching the test line.

Corrugated flexible joint with bellows shape is widely used in many industrial fields as it provides a relatively simple means of absorbing mechanical vibration and deformation due to its inherent flexibility. In this study, an effective equivalent beam modeling technique of corrugated flexible joint bend using a commercial CAE software is proposed to reduce the excessive efforts and costs required for three dimensional shell modelling in vibration analysis of bellows shape structure. When this simple and practical technique, based on the strain energy concept, is employed to modify the beam sectional properties of the flexible joint bend, quite satisfactory results can be obtained.