profile 9
A packaged solution
LMI Technologies has quickly brand is still used in logging systems and the
established itself as a ‘system
Selcom brand can be found in road inspection,
metal foundry, and tyre and rubber systems.
in a box’ supplier of vision
Metcalfe says: ‘We started selling to the lumber
industry and we did not call it machine vision. It’s
solutions, as John Murphy a very primitive industry and only has electricians,
discovers
not machine vision experts, so we call them sensors.
We now have a product line called “Sensors That
See”, which are niche products aimed at a specific
To many people in manufacturing, the idea industry. They don’t care whether it is machine
of machine vision is extremely scary. It’s the sort of vision or not; they just have a problem that they
thing that white-coat scientists create in a lab and need to solve. They don’t want to get involved
really has no place on the production line. in issues of lighting and optics, they just want
Len Metcalfe believes that the very term something that they can switch on and it works.
‘machine vision’ should only be used in private Inside there is something intelligent with lighting,
meetings of specialists. Bandying the term around cameras and sensors, with software included that
is doing nothing for sales. is designed to do a specific job for a particular
His company makes sensors, but they can see. industry – like road inspection, or molten metal
In fact, the brand name is Sensors That See. The processing.
customer does not need to know anything about Len Metcalfe, chairman and CEO of LMI ‘I look at barcode readers as sensors that see in
what happens inside the box. It does a job and Technologies. a very basic form; we just apply the same principle
everything needed for that job is in the package. to other types of applications. We are in fields
This approach has proved very successful in a logging industry, clearly a big deal in its home state that require measurement, such as optimising
lot of industries where technology is regarded with of British Columbia, Canada, and the initials stand yield, and the companies that we acquired were
suspicion. LMI Technologies makes a ‘system in a for Laser Measurement International. Early in the all experts in measurement within particular
box’ for applications in specific industries, which company’s history the most important market industries. The companies that we acquired were
has everything, including the right lighting, in one was logging. Today, this is still a very significant those that owned the intellectual property for
package. The guys who install Metcalfe’s machines business and, in many ways, it is the spiritual metrology in those industries.’
call themselves ‘electricians’. home of the philosophy of hiding the complexity For most of its 10-year history, LMI has built
As much as he would like to, it would be from the customer. LMI makes systems that specialised sensors that have everything in a single
extremely difficult to make a system for every perform ‘yield management’; studying trees in box. They were subsequently sold to machine
industry; it would also be very boring as there are three dimensions and telling the sawmill how to builders and some system integrators, who made
om
always different ways of doing things that have cut them in the most profitable way. This is an them into larger systems that did robot welding
pros and cons in each case. People who know a extremely complex process and the equipment or runway inspections at airports. Along the way
ope.c
lot about particular fields often build PC-based needs to work in very large sawmills, which can LMI developed a lot of very useful technology,
eur
solutions or even embedded solutions, but there be very hostile environments in terms of noise, particularly for integrating very large systems
.imv
is a problem that they can come up against. When radio frequency (RF) interference, temperature, in factories or other extensive locations where www
a PC costs $3,000 and a camera costs $5,000, you humidity and dust. events like strobe lighting had to be synchronised
can charge a similar sum for integrating them into In 1998 Dynamic Control Systems, also known with other parts of the process. It also developed
 
2009 
ch
a system that works – but the cost of the hardware as DynaVision, merged with three other laser- an extensive range of software components
has come down so much that integrators really based measurement and control companies – for machine vision applications as well as the
need some short-cuts. LMI has started selling its Selcom, Sami and Sensors-95 – and became LMI technology to interface with a lot of other products.
ebruary/mar
components, allowing integrators or OEMs to Technologies. Len Metcalfe, the co-founder of It made a lot of sense to start selling these directly  
f
build bespoke systems from standard tried and Dynamic Control Systems, became chairman and to OEMs for them to build systems in applications ope
tested hardware. CEO. Selcom was strong in the tyre and rubber they knew well, but where LMI was not already
This could be seen as a gamble, because it’s industry, as well as road surface inspection. Being dealing.
possible that his customers will come back and based in Sweden gave the company a European Metcalfe continues: ‘We learned a lot over the
compete. But, on the other hand, reducing the base, along with Sensors-95 located in Maastricht, past 30 years and we used that knowledge to
cost of ownership is historically the most effective The Netherlands. SAMI (Sensor Adaptive develop a set of tools that other people can easily
way of increasing the total size of the market. Machines Inc.) was based in Windsor, Ontario and use for their own applications. All the expertise
There should be enough cake for everyone. was strong in the type of process control systems that we use to make our Sensors that See has been
LMI has its roots in process control and the used in the automotive industry. The DynaVision unbundled and documented. OEMs can take
imaging and machine vision eur
IMVEfeb09 pp09-11 profile.indd 9 17/2/09 17:05:24
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