A Close Look at Vision Guided Robotics

Teledyne Dalsa. We’ve all seen videos of robots rapidly assembling cars with little or no human intervention. Industrial robots like these have cut costs and increased productivity in virtually every manufacturing sector, but they have a major shortcoming—they can’t “see.” Programmed to repeat exactly the same motions over and over again, they are unable to detect and maneuver objects of different shapes, sizes, and colors, or objects that touch and overlap. So if a product changes or is added to the production line, the robots must be reprogrammed. Now a new generation of robots guided by advanced machine vision is taking robots far beyond the repetitive tasks typically found in mass production. Fuelled by smaller, more powerful and less expensive cameras and other vision sensors, sophisticated robotic algorithms and processors, these Vision Guided Robot (VGR) systems are rapidly transforming manufacturing processes