Profile Old hands, fresh ideas
Greg Blackman speaks to Torsten Wiesinger at Lucid Vision Labs, one of the newest industrial camera manufacturers on the block
L
ucid Vision Labs will be a new name at the Vision trade fair when it takes place from
6 to 8 November, although there will be some familiar faces at its booth in Stuttgart. Te firm was only founded in January 2017, but it has a pedigree that makes it wise beyond its years, and has hit the ground running with subsidiaries already set up in Asia and Europe. Lucid Vision Labs is the
brainchild of Rod Barman, who was the founder and president at Point Grey Research until it was bought by Flir Systems in 2016. Barman was also the head of engineering at Point Grey for 19 years until it was sold, aſter which he began thinking about starting a new company that would become Lucid Vision. Lucid has employees from
different backgrounds including former Point Grey, Sony, IDS Imaging Development Systems and other technology companies, according to Torsten Wiesinger, general manager of the EMEA region for Lucid Vision. Wiesinger served as CEO of IDS for six years
and has 15 years of experience in the machine vision industry, also working for MVTec Soſtware as sales director. Currently Lucid Vision employs
around 50 people – big for a startup – but Wiesinger said this sort of size is necessary ‘to reach our ambitious goals’. Lucid Vision aims to be in the top five machine vision camera suppliers within five years, and become an established camera vendor on a global scale. ‘Te big differentiator at
Lucid are the people,’ Wiesinger commented. ‘We are a small team of really passionate and experienced people. It’s a lot of fun being part of a small global company, because there are a lot of different viewpoints, and customers from different regions have different needs.’ Te company has its
headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, and has already established subsidiaries in Japan, China, Taiwan, and Germany. In terms of technology,
Wiesinger points to Industry 4.0 as one of the main drivers for the company. ‘More and more, customers are saying that Industry
4.0 and the Internet of Tings is the future,’ he said. Industry 4.0 refers to the fourth industrial revolution, of having much more connected manufacturing, with the idea being to track products as they pass through production and are delivered to the customer. A lot of manufacturing data
will be handled in the cloud in the future, according to Wiesinger, who also has a background in IT. He said the core technology will be the Ethernet network. ‘We will build cameras that can be connected to a PC, or maybe on a network or a server farm, but we see that the standard will be Ethernet,’ he said. All three of Lucid Vision’s camera families are based on Ethernet, with the higher resolution Atlas cameras running over 5GBase-T Power over Ethernet, which has a data transfer rate of 600MB/s. ‘NBase-T will become common
in the market,’ Wiesinger continued. ‘We believe machine vision cameras will converge on Ethernet; it will be the dominant interface. Te camera and host PC will be replaced by camera and network, where the processing is distributed at the edge and in the cloud.’ Te benefit of being a startup,
The Phoenix family has a version for detecting polarised light 58 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • October/Novemnber 2018
however, Wiesinger noted, is that the company is able to focus on the newest protocols and standards. In line with its commitment to Industry 4.0, it plans to support OPC UA, the standard devised by the OPC Foundation to allow factory machines to talk to each other. Lucid Vision has
Torsten Wiesinger, general manager of the EMEA region for Lucid Vision, served as CEO of IDS for six years
also included a web server in its standard machine vision cameras, which is the basis for its ideas for Industry 4.0, Wiesinger added. Te company’s first two camera
families, Phoenix and Triton, offer resolutions from 0.4 megapixels to 20 megapixels, and both have a version based on Sony’s sensor for detecting polarised light. Te Phoenix cameras are the
smallest GigE camera on the market at the moment, according to Wiesinger, measuring 24 x 24mm and available with an NF-mount lens for further space saving. Tey are supplied with an ix industrial Ethernet connector and are transformable, so can be stacked or folded to present the Ethernet port at different angles to the lens to fit different applications. Te Triton cameras are equipped
with M12 and M8 connectors, and can be upgraded to IP67 protection with a lens tube. Meanwhile, Lucid’s Atlas series, which will be launched at the Vision show in
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