Once limited to the inspection of products in high-volume industrial manufacturing processes, machine-vision and image-processing tools are now being used in applications that span undersea exploration, farming, and military applications.
I glimpsed this potential in 1982, when I watched the feed from the first remote video camera lowered into a reactor vessel at Three Mile Island, after the nuclear accident had destroyed the reactor core in 1979. It took several years to develop the imaging equipment for this first foray and, in the years that followed, many cameras and robots would gather information about damage and perform cleanup operations in highly radioactive areas of the plant.
Although robots were not then sophisticated enough to perform major operations—and stereo vision was practically a dream—the future of vision-guided robots was obvious.
Very slick
As I write this, operators are using video cameras to guide a dozen remotely operated vehicles working 5000 ft below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, performing complex actions as they try to stem the massive oil leak resulting from an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig.
Such remotely operated vehicles are also playing an increasing role in similar land-based crises. Our cover story, for example, shows how 3-D displays can help remote operators in the military safely handle and dispose of explosive devices using robots. Another article explains how single-sensor image fusion technology could enable simpler and more effective imaging of potential threats in security and defense operations.
Machine vision is not always on the front line of environmental and security challenges, however. Researchers from the University of Ilmenau in Germany are using image-processing techniques to evaluate the quality of wheat after it is harvested. And, as contributing editor Winn Hardin explains, manufacturers are using other techniques to ensure that the steel tubes produced for oil and gas production are of the highest quality.
This broadening range of biomedical, robotics, military, and aerospace applications is leading software vendors to expand the functionality of their products beyond simple measurement functions, as editor Andy Wilson writes in his Product Focus article on machine-vision software.
Indeed, new opportunities for machine-vision and image-processing systems are occurring every year. The teaming of vision and robots, in particular, will be on display at AUTOMATICA this June in Munich. To take advantage of these developments, however, suppliers of machine-vision systems will have to look outside the box of conventional industrial manufacturing and into niche applications that span the gamut from agriculture to space exploration.
W. Conard Holton, Editor in Chief
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