3D VISION


of these systems, NIST is working on best practices for 3D vision solutions for particular applications. Saidi and his team are speaking to industry experts and consolidating the information into something that everyone can use – users, integrators, and manufacturers. He said he welcomes participation from the industry. Selby said that any reputable company


developing automation solutions should be able to offer trials and demonstrations of equipment to a reasonably high level, so that the expectation is met by the customer prior to sale, or through a period of test and proof of concept. Soetens said that a lot of people are yet to


‘Te performance needs to be well understood, so when the customer asks... they know what to expect’


huge pool of people with automation knowledge who don’t necessarily have that vision knowledge where there’s opportunities for partnerships,’ he said. Te Manufacturing Technology Centre,


which takes ideas from academia and translates them into practical applications for industry, has worked on depalletising applications and, most recently, has been looking at deep learning-based methods for speeding up pick-and-place. ‘Te challenge that we see with quite a lot of pick-and-place applications isn’t really around the vision; the vision is good enough and fast enough. Even the robots are fast enough,’ Robson said. One challenge, he feels, is robot path planning. ‘If your task isn’t structured enough and there are several options for how the robot has to move, then figuring out the best motion plan for more complicated tasks is a


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challenge that we’re looking at.’ Te centre is investigating deep learning


for robot assembly, where the robot has to find an object and pick it up accurately enough to assemble it. Robson also believes there are quite a lot of applications using 3D vision and robotics, in combination with deep learning, around agriculture and handling food.


Make it easy to use Te key to increasing adoption of 3D vision for robotics, according to Saidi, is to make the technology as simple to use as possible. ‘Unless SMEs understand what to expect


from a technology, it’s going to be hard to get them to use it,’ he said. ‘Because even people with experience in machine vision have had lots of issues in terms of expectations – they think a technology is going to do something for them and it ends up not working the way they expected. It gets shelved or not used, and it’s very frustrating for them. SMEs going through that, that will completely put them off. ‘First, it needs to be very simple to use,’


he continued. ‘More importantly, the performance, how well these things work, needs to be well understood, so that when they [the customer] ask for something they know what to ask for, and when they get it they know what to expect.’ In order to help the users and integrators


buy their first 3D vision system. ‘What we see is that a lot of users are making the same mistakes regarding designing the gripper or setting up their cell,’ he said. Tis led Pickit to the conclusion that the firm has to help customers think about the gripper and the robot alongside the vision – as more of a complete solution. ‘We see companies partnering – gripper


companies, vision companies, robot companies. Everyone is looking for this magical mix of the perfect combination for a given application,’ he said. ‘Te industry would prefer to have a


reliable and tested set of components that work well together, instead of having all the freedom of choice but the freedom to make a mistake,’ Soetens continued. He believes that over the next two years there will be much more integration between the gripper, the software, the camera and the robot. Selby added that education at an early


stage – at university and schools – is important to further the use of robotics. Fanuc globally has education products for robotics that include vision. ‘It’s important to us that engineers of the future are able to take those robotic products and implement vision systems on them,’ he said. O


The webinar can be viewed at: www.imveurope.com/webcasts


Share your experience developing and deploying 3D vision and robot systems. Please get in touch for opportunities to write for us: greg.blackman@europascience.com


FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE 27


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