A California-based startup called Instrumental developed an intelligent AI inspection system to help manufactures identify product defects on the assembly line.
The California-based startup, founded by two form Apple engineers have raised over $10 million to make it easier to manufacture electronics and head off complicated problems before they start costing companies thousands of dollars a minute. Their customers, including Fortune 500 companies, have used the system to virtually disassemble 16,000 units and to take over 40,000 measurements, all remotely.
Instrumental makes a hardware box that goes on the assembly line and takes a photo of every device that passes through and they recently announced their deep learning software called Detect which highlights units that appear defective or anomalous, giving customers a significant edge in discovering and resolving product issues.
Using TITAN X GPUs and cuDNN with the TensorFlow deep learning framework, they are able to process hundreds of units in seconds and identify the most interesting units to review.

According to their blog, an engineer using Detect remotely caught an assembly process issue still in progress on the line and was able to inform the factory to correct it right away. To help with this, Instrumental uses Tesla GPUs on the Amazon cloud to provide customers with real-time results.
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AI Helps Manufacturers Identify Product Defects
Jun 22, 2017
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AI-Generated Summary
- Instrumental, a California-based startup founded by former Apple engineers, developed an AI-powered inspection system that photographs every device on the assembly line to identify defects remotely.
- The company's Detect software uses deep learning with TensorFlow, TITAN X GPUs, and cuDNN to process hundreds of units in seconds and rank anomalies by visual difference.
- Customers, including Fortune 500 companies, have virtually disassembled 16,000 units and taken over 40,000 measurements using the system, with one engineer catching an active assembly issue in real time via Tesla GPUs on Amazon cloud.
Next Step
- Read the Business Insider article for more details on Instrumental's funding and technology.
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