Vision at the SPS

The Top 5 Machine Vision Products of the SPS Fair

At the SPS trade fair in Nuremberg (Germany) at the end of November, the main focus was on automation. However, there were also numerous interesting innovations on the subject of machine vision, which were shown there for the first time and will be presented below.

(Image: LMI Technologies Inc. / IFM Electronic GmbH / Sick AG / Baumer Group / Hema Electronic GmbH)

Automatic coordinate alignment robot & vision sensor

The VeriSens XF900 and XC900 vision sensors from Baumer (www.baumer.com/verisens-ur) control Cobots from Universal Robots after just a few minutes of setup. Calibration for image rectification, conversion to world coordinates and coordinate matching between vision sensor and robot is automatic thanks to the patent-pending SmartGrid. This eliminates the otherwise time-consuming manual hand-eye calibration of the robot and vision sensor. Only two additional commands (nodes) are required in the robot programming itself, so that numerous applications can benefit from the advantages of Vision Guided Robotics across industries.

From recording to display under 35ms

On a specially developed embedded vision board, hema electronic (www.hema.de) is one of the first companies to use the new Ultra Low Latency 10bit 4:2:2 SDI video subsystem from Xilinx. An XU8 and an XU9 module from the Swiss FPGA module specialist Enclustra will also be used in the demo. With ultra-short latency times of less than 35ms at 60fps from image acquisition to display on screens, the demo shows possible applications for Multi-Stream or Multi-View. Typical fields of application include image processing, machine, plant and vehicle control, video surveillance and real-time video communication for augmented reality application scenarios.

PMD profile sensor for contour detection

The PMD profiler from ifm electronics (www.ifm.com) not only checks the presence of an object, but also determines whether the intended component has been used and correctly attached. For this purpose, the contour of the tested object is compared with the target contour taught-in in advance at the touch of a button using the light-section method. With a colour display and 3-button operation, the sensor is ready for operation within a few minutes, even without software. In order to detect deviations in almost similar components more reliably, the profile evaluation can be limited to the relevant object area via the ROI function with two markings on the visible laser line. Optionally, IO-Link can be used to transfer information on the reject rate and recorded object profiles.

3D sensors with optical character recognition

The Gocator 3D Smart Sensors from LMI Technologies (www.lmi3D.com) now support optical character recognition and barcode reading. The integrated ‘Surface OCR’ tool recognizes and extracts strings from surfaces using either 3D height map scan data or 2D intensity data. With the ‘Surface Barcode’ tool, data encoded in 1D and 2D barcodes can be read from surface data (2D intensity or 3D height map) without the need for additional 2D cameras or special barcode readers. The ‘Surface Barcode’ tool is now available for every Gocator 3D Smart Sensor, and the ‘Surface OCR’ tool is now available for every GoMax.

Contactless Car Body Localization System

With the Body Positioning System BPS-5400, Sick (www.sick.com), together with a customer from the automotive industry, has developed a system that works contact-free and enables more flexibility in production and shorter cycle times. The localization system for vehicle bodies ensures high-precision measurement of the body position and enables process-safe robot guidance. The system can be integrated into all control worlds and is available turnkey for different working distances and field of view widths. With localization rates of over 99.996% and possible savings in cycle times of 5%, the performance data is also convincing.