News People
Flir Commercial Systems has appointed Loic Premartin to the position of vice-president of sales for EMEA.
Edmund Optics has appointed former Schott executive, Gerard Robless, to its Board of Directors.
Omron Europe (Industrial Automation Business) has appointed Hiroyuki Usui as chief executive officer in succession to Shizuto Yukomoto.
Geoff Roddick, application engineering manager at Pleora Technologies, has been appointed vice-chair of the GigE Vision Technical Committee.
Vision Components has appointed Sven Klette-Matzat as sales director
Video improves safety of forklift trucks
As part of the Forkliſt Eye research project, researchers at the Institute of Materials Handling, Material Flow, and Logistics at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Munich University of Technology are working on integrating video cameras in material handling devices, such as forkliſt trucks. Te aim is to improve the efficiency and safety of material flow processes. Forkliſt trucks may be used both out of
doors and in dark warehouses, difficult lighting conditions for a vision system. Te system incorporates LEDs operated by an IPSC4-r2 lighting control system from Smartek, distributed by Framos, to make it insensitive to ambient light. Te aim is to keep the number of cameras required to a minimum. Tis means that the lens must fulfil certain requirements, as it must be able to perform the largest possible number of image processing tasks from the camera’s installation location, for objects of vastly different sizes and distances.
News from UKIVA By Dr John Haddon
Are the internet and social media decreasing the need for face-to- face contact? The biggest face-to- face business opportunities have traditionally been through trade exhibitions. However, with leaner workforces in most organisations, the ability to use the internet to check out different products from manufacturers all over the world without leaving your desk is an attractive alternative.
While specialist vision exhibitions such as the annual Vision Show in Stuttgart continue to flourish, in the UK the only remaining vision- related show is Photonex. However this contraction may not simply be due to the intervention of the internet, but more to do with the diversity of vision applications. Many companies in the UK now prefer to exhibit at application-related exhibitions, such as those covering
processing, packaging, traffic, food, design, manufacturing and security to name just a few. However, there is still plenty of face-to-face contact. But while visitors to, for example, packaging shows, can see the benefits that vision has to offer as part of coding and marking systems or cartoning machines, what about those engineers who really do want to get to the nitty gritty of the vision system?
Evidence from UKIVA members suggests that there is still a big appetite for face-to-face contact and this is achieved through well- targeted seminars, road shows and technology days run by individual companies. These events are generally well attended and offer a more intimate opportunity to discuss vision technology and particular applications in depth with vision experts. For example,
6 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • June/July 2012
those companies from the UKIVA membership hosting events include Multipix Imaging, which is hosting a Halcon 11 road show in June, Stemmer Imaging, planning an Open House in September, Scorpion Vision, planning a machine vision 3D robot guidance workshop in September, and National Instruments, running NIDays featuring vision in London in November. So clearly the vision community in the UK still values face-to-face contact very highly and the internet can provide further opportunities for personalised interactions. The most obvious of these are the webinars, or webcasts, where organisations can run on-line, interactive seminars. Europa Science, publishers of Imaging and Machine Vision Europe periodically organise webcasts, and in June, National Instruments will be hosting a series of Smart Machine
webcasts that will feature vision very heavily.
The use of social media is now also beginning to grow in the business- to-business environment. For vision companies, YouTube provides the perfect opportunity to showcase a vision system in action! More and more companies have Facebook pages and are using Twitter to inform people of their latest activities. The UKIVA website (
www.ukiva.org) provides a constant newsfeed of breaking news from its members, and summaries of those news items are tweeted.
The perception that direct,
personalised contact is becoming a thing of the past is far from true. Traditional, face-to-face activities can be supported by the flexibility offered by the internet and social media, to make sure that direct contact is maintained.
www.imveurope.com
Based on the Smartek soſtware development
kit, the engineers of the Munich University of Technology implement a soſtware framework by linking established image processing libraries and special recognition algorithms. Framos has supported the Forkliſt Eye project since mid-2011.
Gilles Lougassi/
Shutterstock.com
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