Canon U.S.A. Inc. has announced its entry into the expanding machine vision market in the United States with the launch of the RV300, RV500, and RV1100 3D machine vision systems, which are designed for use with industrial robots.
In combination with robotic arms, the 3D vision systems are designed to increase production efficiencies in factory automation applications by facilitating the automatic high-speed supply of parts to production lines by recognizing and picking individual items from a randomly assembled pile of parts. All three models feature a 3D machine vision head, which includes the system sensor and 3D machine vision recognition software for recognition processing.
The systems can recognize a diverse range of products, including parts with curved features, parts with few distinguishing characteristics and intricately structured parts. The RV300, RV500, RV1100 enable the 3D recognition of randomly-piled parts as small as approximately 10 mm2, 20 mm2, and 45 mm2, respectively. Additionally, the models—which can recognize parts in approximately 1.8 seconds in 3D—have a high level of accuracy: the RV300, RV500, and RV1100 achieve exceedingly small error tolerances of less than 0.1 mm2, 0.15 mm2, and 0.5mm 2, respectively.
Users of the 3D vision systems can register data for parts to be picked up by inputting CAD data and by capturing images of the parts randomly assembled in a pile. The systems can use computer-generated images to automatically learn how to visually identify the parts. Furthermore, since no complicated programming is necessary, users can easily re-register parts in accordance with changes in type and shape of parts to be supplied in production.
The market for 3D machine vision systems, according to Canon, is expected to grow significantly in the future, driven by strong demand for the further automation of production lines used by manufacturers in a variety of industries, including automotive and automotive component manufacturers. In 2014, global sales of 3D and 3D machine vision systems for use with industrial robots totaled approximately $22 million. Canon’s 3D machine vision systems are expected to be available on October 1, 2015.
View the Canon press release.
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