Festo and V-viz enter partnership to promote use of intelligent vision systems in automation

Citation

(2010), "Festo and V-viz enter partnership to promote use of intelligent vision systems in automation", Assembly Automation, Vol. 30 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.2010.03330aab.002

Festo and V-viz enter partnership to promote use of intelligent vision systems in automation

Article Type: News From: Assembly Automation, Volume 30, Issue 1

Uses include inline product monitoring and inspection for quality, part identification, and orientation, fine positioning and placement, fault diagnosis and process monitoring for dynamic real-time optimization.

Festo UK has entered into a strategic partnership with the specialist machine vision company V-viz Ltd, to promote the use of intelligent vision systems in automation. The affiliation comes at a particularly pertinent time for manufacturers seeking to counter the effects of the recession by maximising the efficiency and quality of their production processes – these are areas where high-speed image capture and analysis can play a vital role.

V-viz Ltd is a leading provider of automated inspection and traceability solutions. Based in Offchurch, Warwickshire, the company was founded in 2004 and has already established an enviable reputation for its expertise and innovation in high-quality machine vision systems.

Under the terms of the partnership, V-viz will support a wide range of sales, installation and commissioning tasks, with Festo manufacturing the vision system hardware and application software. According to Mark Worlidge, Managing Director of V-viz, “To realise their full potential, vision systems need to be deployed very carefully and by proven experienced professionals, paying particular attention to factors such as the selection of correct lighting. On no account should such systems simply be shoehorned into machines – they need to be properly integrated and optimised to suit the application and their environment.”

Festo will be supplying V-viz with its latest SBO intelligent vision systems. Developed specifically for use in factory automation, these exceptionally compact smart camera systems feature substantial built-in intelligence and control logic. They can be supplied as intelligent wide area-based systems for quality and inspection roles or setup to acquire high-quality images at very high speeds, without the need for a separate processor. The high-speed versions of these cameras can be used for process monitoring and commissioning, recording the manufacturing processes, to identify operating problems and aid the appropriate remedial action.

Festo's SBO intelligent vision systems are some of the smallest high-speed cameras on the market, and are thought to be the only models available sealed to IP65/67 standard. The quality-monitoring versions of the cameras offer extremely short inspection times, enabling higher throughput than rival systems. Speed of set up is another key advantage, making 100 percent quality inspection and reduction of process downtime achievable in an industrial environment.

The high-speed camera is capable of accommodating frame rates as high as 2,000 s^-1 to facilitate monitoring of very fast motion sequences, and is able to save acquired images as compressed JPEG files in order to minimise memory requirements. In normal use, the camera records continuously – either saving the images to an internal ring buffer with a 10 s capacity, or streaming them to an external hard drive – until instructed to stop by a trigger signal. The vision systems feature an integral web server and can be networked via standard Ethernet, and are controlled by an industry-standard PC. A time synchronisation feature enables multiple camera installations to be set up and controlled in a very flexible manner.

For more information, visit: www.festo.com