A Vision-Based Pose-Adjustment Soft Surface With Backlit Illumination for Multiadaptive Inspection

Electronics inspection in production and maintenance lines faces distinct challenges. Fixed-focus imaging thrives in standardized production layouts but faces challenges with unpredictable irregularities in maintenance lines, such as component layouts and geometries. To address this, researchers explored adaptive platforms, particularly soft programmable surfaces for pose control. However, most existing solutions rely on light-sensitive feedback, and lack passive adaptability and integrated backlit illumination, which limits their effectiveness. This article introduces the villi-like adaptive leveling and backlit illumination soft surface (VALBS), a soft robotic platform that integrates passive compliance, active pneumatic three degree of freedom pose control, and embedded backlit illumination, enabling robust inspection without altering camera hardware. Building on this, the soft actuated multiadaptive inspection (SAMI) platform is constructed, comprising a${\rm{2 \times 2}}$array of VALBS units. Each VALBS adjusts the object’s pose through pneumatic actuation, guided by an analytical control model and visual feedback. Experiments show SAMI achieves 100% contour detection accuracy and 85% –100% pose adjustment success rate on five representative layouts pattern of printed circuit board assembly along with a range of commercially available mainboards, validating the platform’s effectiveness in handling geometric and lighting condition variability in maintenance-line inspection.