LOGISTICS
Why logistics firms want flexible machine vision
Facing new pressures and demands, logistics operations are calling for adaptable machine vision solutions to drive efficiency, discovers Benjamin Skuse
T
he global Covid-19 pandemic may be referred to in the past tense in many countries, but its impacts are still felt
in a slew of different areas of society, not least logistics. Worldwide supply chain disruption, a drop in international trade, semiconductor and other component shortages, and a severe labour shortage due to freedom of movement restrictions, have conspired to make running a successful logistics operation more difficult than ever. At the same time, due to the pandemic
making online shopping a necessity, consumers and businesses have gone digital, and they are not turning back. E-commerce sales have soared, which for logistics has meant increasing order volumes and more demanding fulfilment speeds. “Tis transformation has been so fast, so
abrupt, that the only way for e-commerce and logistics companies to be able to fulfil is by automating – and that’s what they’re all trying to do,” says Donato Montanari, Vice President and General Manager of Machine Vision at Zebra Technologies. Yet for some companies, handheld
barcode scanners are the closest they have got to implementing machine vision. Others have expensive legacy management systems and visibility solutions they are reluctant to ditch. For many, a rapidly evolving business means a fit-for-purpose solution today may not pass muster in six months. For all, the very nature of logistics today calls for solutions that can cope with organised chaos. Tis is why – alongside the imperative to add value – flexibility is at the heart of today’s machine vision products for logistics.
Flexible parcel identification In the 1990s, when Vitronic installed its parcel identification technology at the
Worldport in Louisville, USA – UPS’s largest parcel distribution centre worldwide – they also installed 160 video coding stations. Workers sat at screens staring at images of parcels, where they manually coded up parcels that had not been read automatically by Vitronic’s system of conveyor belts fitted with fixed line scan cameras reading barcodes and address labels. Today, manual video coding is almost a
thing of the past for the company. Vitronic’s Vipac identification system achieves a near 100% identification rate, still using line scan cameras, but utilising machine vision to identify codes that can be obscured by foil, damaged in transit or otherwise scrambled,
10 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE APRIL/MAY 2023
as well as handwritten address information and dangerous goods labels, wherever they may be hidden on a given parcel. “We’re taking images on all six sides –
including underneath – viewing a complete 360 degrees and at very high speed (up to 4.5m/s) and then the Vipac system is decoding it using our software,” says Gary Young, Vitronic’s Head of External Sales for Business Unit Automation and Global Key Account Manager for courier, express and parcel services (CEP). “We also now identify the parcel’s shape and size (and in some locations weigh the parcel), where the data can be used to cross-reference that against the customer’s database.” Te result
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