Benchtop robots work with machine vision

Highly accurate and powerful robot systems used to automate bench top work such as automatic dispensing, soldering, product inspection, can now be equipped with machine vision cameras.

Sony's desktop robots Robokids and Castpro II are compact, highly accurate and powerful robot systems.

Used for bench top work such as automatic dispensing, soldering, product inspection, pharmaceutical and other automated, labour saving tasks, these machines can drastically improve production.

The Robokids is programmed by setting coordinates which the machine will follow devoutly.

However, a new development in this advanced robotic technology has recently been announced by Sony which has increased the Robokids power and flexibility 100-fold.

Robokids is now available with cameras and the vision is processed by Scorpion Vision Software.

This means that neither the picking point nor the target has to be pre-defined accurately as is normally the case with any standard industrial robot system.

Instead, the robot will request the measurement or pick point coordinates from Scorpion Vision, Scorpion Vision will identify the target objects and pass the X,Y and Z coordinates back to the robot in milliseconds.

This reduces the cost and difficulty of deploying automated systems, as the location of the target object can be anywhere in the field of view and located with a guaranteed precision of 0.02mm Trials have shown that this system is extremely effective; a test measurement of 180 pressure sensors was carried out in less than 6 minutes - far more cost effective and considerably faster than manual inspection with a microscope.

This capability is achieved thanks to one of Scorpion's many key strengths - that is the ability to add as many cameras as are required.

In the case of the pressure sensor measurement, this task was achieved using four cameras placed at each side of the inspection area, so giving complete, unrestricted view of the subject.

The Cast Pro II covers 350 x 350mm - available in a 2,3 and 4 axis version.

The smaller Robokids covers an area of 250 x 210mm.

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