Eyes on the Line

Abstract

This article discusses vision-enabled robots that are helping factories to keep the production lines rolling, even when the parts are out of place. The automotive industry was one of the earliest to adopt industrial robots, and continues to be one of its biggest users, but now industrial robots are turning up in more unusual factory settings, including pharmaceutical production and packaging, consumer electronics assembly, machine tooling, and food packaging. No current market research is available that breaks down vision-enabled versus blind robot usage. However, all the major industrial robot manufacturers are turning out models that are vision-enabled; one manufacturer said that its entire current line of robots are vision enabled. All it takes to change over the robot system is some fairly basic tooling changes to the robot's end-effector, and some programming changes in the software. The combination of speed, relatively low cost , flexibility, and ease of use that vision-enabled robots offer is making an increasing number of factories consider putting another set of eyes on their lines.