Industrial robots can cut costs and increase productivity in virtually every manufacturing sector, but they have a major shortcoming - they can’t 'see'. Now a new generation of robots guided by advanced machine vision is taking robots far beyond the repetitive tasks typically found in mass production.
Robotic Vision Technologies, a machine vision software firm specialising in vision-guided robotics, has secured more than $10.5 million in funding to support its growth in the industrial and collaborative robot markets
A collaborative research project between academic and commercial entities is exploring how a combination of imaging, machine learning and robotics could be used to automate the unloading of standard 40-foot shipping containers
British online supermarket, Ocado, is trialling a prototype collaborative robot designed to support human technicians maintain and repair equipment in the company’s automated warehouses
Researchers at Ocado Technology, the tech division of the online supermarket Ocado, have developed a prototype robot picking solution that uses a 3D vision system to identify and pick up objects from crates
The German engineering association, VDMA, has raised its 2017 forecast from 10 to 18 per cent growth in machine vision turnover in Germany, corresponding to €2.6 billion
Machine vision is one of the driving forces of industrial automation. For a long time, it’s been primarily pushed forward by improvements made in 2D image sensing and, for some applications, 2D sensing is still an optimal tool to solve a problem. But the majority of challenges machine vision is facing today has a 3D character. From well-established metrology up to new applications in smart robotics, 3D sensors serve as a main source of data. Here, we discuss the parameters of 3D sensing techniques.
Sales of industrial robots in China grew by 27 per cent in 2016, and are expected to increase on average between 15 and 20 per cent per year from 2018 to 2020, according to a report from the International Federation of Robotics
Dyson's 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner relies on vision to navigate its way around a home. Mike Aldred from Dyson spoke about the product's development at the UKIVA machine vision conference in Milton Keynes, and Greg Blackman was there to hear the presentation
Collaborators from three London universities are researching how an artificial vision system inspired by the human eye could be used to guide robots in a £1.3 million three-year EPSRC project
MVTec’s Halcon software library includes a deep learning OCR tool with pre-trained fonts from a wide range of industries. Credit: MVTec
Matthew Dale explores vision solutions for code reading and inspection in pharmaceutical production
Engineers at KYB in front of a pick-and-place solution for handling steel metal cylinders. Credit: Pickit
Car manufacturing has been hit hard by Covid-19, but the need for automation on production lines has not diminished, as Greg Blackman finds out
A point cloud of a National Research Council Canada artefact superimposed on a CAD model. Credit: NIST
How do you choose a 3D vision system for a robot cell? Geraldine Cheok and Kamel Saidi at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the USA discuss an initiative to define standards for industrial 3D imaging
SWIR imaging can show bruising in fruit that wouldn't be evident with a visible camera. Credit: Sony
Edmund Optics’s Thomas Armspach-Young and Boris Lange consider the optics needed to get the best out of Sony's new short-wave infrared image sensors
What kind of economic development do you expect during and after this crisis?
Findings from a two-part survey, conducted by the European Machine Vision Association, on the effects the Covid-19 pandemic could have on the machine vision industry
Credit: Drag&bot
Christoph Hellmann Santos, of the ROS Industrial Consortium Europe and Fraunhofer IPA, explains why more industrial users are now building robots through the open source software platform, Robot Operating System
