NEWS In brief
Uwe Furtner is stepping down as managing director ofMatrix Vision. Uwe Hagmaier will join the company’s management team as the new division manager of research and development, while Ralf Grasmann takes on the role of site manager.
Fredrik Wikfeldt has taken over as CEO of Laser Components Nordic. Before joining the firm, he held positions at Stemmer Imaging and Carl Zeiss.
MVTec Software is expanding its partner network in Southeast Asia with two distributors from Thailand and Vietnam.
Gardasoft has appointed CCS America as distributor of Gardasoft controllers and accessories in North America.
Hyperspectral centre founded for precision agriculture
A centre of hyperspectral and remote sensing has been set up by Headwall and high-precision agriculture firm Geo- Konzept. Te centre will be located at Geo-
Konzept’s headquarters in Adelschlag, Germany. It will support the use of hyperspectral imaging technology, such as those systems provided by Headwall, combined with other sensors, including lidar and high-precision GPS. Te focus will be on agriculture, mining, environmental monitoring and infrastructure inspection applications. Te facility will have large areas for
unmanned drone flights and certified unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) pilots available to test and demonstrate hyperspectral imaging technology and to train the next generation of UAV operators. Geo-Konzept provides GPS and GIS
technologies for agriculture and forestry. Te firm announced the formation of the centre at the recent Agritechnica show in Hanover, Germany. Headwall supplies UAV-based solutions
for agriculture applications, ranging from plant phenotyping to early detection of crop disease. It has a broad portfolio of hyperspectral and multispectral sensors.
Economic downturn hits robotics and automation
By Anne Wendel, director, VDMA Machine Vision
The German robotics and automation sector cannot escape the economic slowdown in the mechanical engineering industry. The expectation for 2019 is that sales in the German robotics and automation sector will fall by 5 per cent to €14.3bn. The VDMA monthly incoming
order statistics for the robotics and automation industry show that an initially high order backlog was largely reduced over the course of this year, and the autumn upturn familiar from previous years failed to materialise. After a decade of sales records, the German robotics and automation sector – an important innovation and growth sector – is now
facing difficulties because of the slowing global economy. This will affect all sub-sectors of robotics and automation. For machine vision, a 7 per cent decline in industry sales is expected in 2019. The largest sub-sector, integrated assembly solutions, is expected to decline by 5 per cent, while robotics sales are also predicted to fall by 3 per cent. Along with the slowing global
economy, saturation effects in important markets also play a role in the decline. For example, worldwide sales of smartphones are stagnating, which is having an impact on investment in machinery. In addition, the uncertainty in many customer industries is causing a reluctance to invest. The uncertainties from the transformation of the automotive industry and the increasing number of trade disputes are having a particularly strong impact here. As a turnaround is not yet in sight, VDMA Robotics and
6 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE DECEMBER 2019/JANUARY 2020
Automation is forecasting a further decrease in sector turnover of 10 per cent for 2020. However, regardless of the current economic difficulties, one thing is clear: as a key technology for optimising production, robotics and automation will continue to play a central role in the future and return to its growth course in the medium term.
OPC UA demonstrator at SPS The autumn is a busy period for VDMA Machine Vision and its members. In November, about 30 participants from the robotics and automation community met to exchange ideas around the topic of ‘how to make machine vision projects successful’. At the recent SPS trade fair
in Nuremberg, Germany, VDMA Machine Vision organised a panel discussion on the topic of image processing. It was also represented on OPC Foundation’s booth, which was showing an OPC UA hardware
demonstrator, a practical implementation of the OPC UA for Machine Vision, part one, companion specification. From the point of view of automation technology and factory-IT, this OPC UA for Machine Vision specification represents enormous progress. OPC MV part one describes
‘Robotics and automation will continue to play a central role in the future’
an abstraction of the generic image processing system, i.e. a representation of a digital twin of the system. The demonstrator establishes
an infrastructure layer to give uniform integration of image processing systems into higher- level IT production systems (such as PLC, Scada, MES, ERP, Cloud). It demonstrates generalised control of a vision system and abstracts the necessary behaviour via the concept of a state machine.
@imveurope |
www.imveurope.com
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