Vision-Guided Inline Leak Testing Cell
Project overview
An HVAC manufacturer needed reliable leak detection on brazed copper tubing — a quality-critical step where a missed leak becomes a warranty problem or a field failure. The challenge: the tubing and braze joints don’t sit in exactly the same position every time, so a fixed, “always move to the same point” robot path won’t reliably find the joint that needs testing.
Akeratos developed and deployed an inline sniff testing cell built around a Universal Robots UR5e, integrated with Micropsi Industries vision guidance. Rather than following a rigid pre-programmed path, the vision system dynamically guides the sniff probe to the actual location of each braze joint — adapting in real time to part-to-part variation. The result is accurate, repeatable leak identification directly on the production line, with the consistency that manual sniff testing struggles to maintain shift after shift.
The system is fully deployed and operational in production — not a pilot or a proof of concept, but a working part of the client’s manufacturing line.
