June 28--Braintech Inc. (North Vancouver, BC, Canada; www.braintech.com) announces that its wholly owned subsidiary, Braintech Canada, Inc., has agreed to license robotic systems to Marubeni Corp. (Tokyo, Japan; www.marubeni.com). This agreement, which covers Southeast Asia and Australia, grants an exclusive license to Marubeni to manufacture and distribute Braintech's Vision Guided Robotic (VGR) systems.
Under the brand name "RoboNavigator," Marubeni will develop and fully integrate VGR solutions with industrial computer systems and vision technologies using Braintech's eVF, a dedicated VGR development, runtime, and support environment. Braintech will charge Marubeni a runtime license per system for its eVF environment as well as engineering services per project.
Marubeni has already opened a Marubeni Vision Techno Centre (MVTC) for application development and demonstration of "RoboNavigator" in Japan's VR Technology Centre (Nagoya, Japan). Product launch is slated for early Q3-2002.
Initially, the two companies will collaborate on developing specific applications for the automotive powertrain sector by selling directly to both Japanese automakers and powertrain systems integrators. The powertrain sector is expected to rapidly adopt VGR automation technology and grow globally to approximately US $2 billion in software and integration revenues by 2006.
