theBoltzmann
2009-06-01 05:43:02 UTC
The modern robot industry is addressing itself to develop the vision technology for robot cells in order to increase productivity and open new processes to automation. According to a lot of researches and experts’ opinions, the vision technology will award to robots higher reliability decreasing cost and increasing ease of use.
Vision system isn’t new in automotive robotics but, because of its great reliability and low costs, it is gaining greater penetration and there are a lot of possible quality enhancements.
In Rick Youngblood and Roberta Nelson Shea’ s ideas, two important character in different automation industries, vision system can be employed in the field of chassis assembling and safety driving.
More robots are vision-ready, which allows users to simply plug in a camera.
Adil Shafi, president of Shafi, explains that there are only two requirements for a robot to work with vision and to see things randomly in space: we need to be able to talk to the vision sensor, either through a PC or directly to the sensor, and secondly, we need to be able to see that the robot updates its location when it’s given some feedback by vision.
Therefore these robots become good to adapt their application to different environments. This is the first pace to a massive adoption, final purpose of an industry which is improving this technology toward cheaper and much more precise and reliable robots. Moreover every industry will give users software of developing and controlling making easier use and giving the user a fundamental autonomy.
There are some difference between how vision was before and how vision is developing. Some years ago it use correlation-based pattern matching which relied on light levels, and that was very, sensitive to changes in lighting and appearance. Now algorithms have been improved to find the 3D position and orientation of parts, there are higher levels of integration that are emerging between robots and vision.
Vision system can revolutionize especially the welding phase in every vehicle building sector. “They are starting to look towards better weld quality and tracking of welds, logging the quality of the spot-welding and being able to track that to particular vehicles”, Michael DeWitte, sales director for Kuka Robotics, says.
The maturation of vision system technology is opening new avenues for industrial robots. In the future we can expect greater integration between robots and vision to combat the darkening economic landscape.