A Morphology and Coordinate Fusion-Based Positioning Method for Solar Cell Classification

The promotion of low carbonation techniques stimulates the booming demand on solar cells. One of the cutting-edge techniques is to identify online the electronic characteristics of each solar cell through the adjustment of probe positions in connection with thin wires of in-process cells for the clustering applications with different qualities. However, the fast and precise coordinate measurement of an in-process solar cell becomes a bottleneck.To this end, amorphology and coordinate fusion-based positioning method is proposed to discern accurately and efficiently the position offsets and the angle deflection of a cell. First, several image processing tools are used that reduce a cell image to an image of featured lines in a fast speed. Then, the phase of coordinate fusion takes several steps to determine the cell coordinates precisely. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposedmethod, where different images of in-process solar cells under both normal lights and contaminated lights are acquired by a real-world machine vision system for the estimation of the actual coordinates. The results show that the cell coordinates have been measured precisely with the maximal position error by58.89 μm under normal lights or 90.16 μm under contaminated lights and the maximal angle error by 0.01° under normal lights or 0.25° under contaminated lights. The technique is a step forward in the process of clustering solar cells associated with the cutting-edge automatic production.