Braintech announces collaborative project with the NRC-IC

AUGUST 30--Braintech Inc. (North Vancouver, BC, Canada; www.braintech.com) has begun work on a jointly funded project with the National Research Council of Canada--Innovation Centre (NRC-IC) to develop vision science and technology specific to geometric stereo vision. The research project is focused on solving the industrial problem of handling unsorted parts in a bin. The results of the research will be the exclusive intellectual property of Braintech under special license from the NRC-IC.

The "bin of parts" problem is a classic problem for vision-guided robotics, especially where the parts are uniform and may be presented to the camera in any position. The ability to manipulate these parts directly with a robot instead of using a complex mechanical part feeder allows more-rapid and seamless introduction of robots in a manufacturing environment. Removal of mechanical part feeders will reduce implementation costs and downtime and improve productivity.

Says Babak Habibi, president and COO of Braintech, "We predict that 3-D vision technology will have far-reaching applications in the area of vision-guided robotics (VGR). In our opinion, VGR is an extremely important enabling technology for manufacturing and will result in considerable gains in flexibility and efficiency."

The project is scheduled to take approximately 19 months, and the costs will be divided evenly between Braintech and the NRC-IC.