Festo and V-viz team up to promote vision systems

Festo UK has entered into a strategic partnership with V-viz, a specialist machine vision company, to promote the use of intelligent vision systems in automation.

The affiliation comes at a time when manufacturers are seeking to counter the effects of the recession by maximising the efficiency and quality of their production processes.

These are areas where high-speed image capture and analysis can play a vital role, according to Festo.

Under the terms of the partnership, V-viz will support a range of sales, installation and commissioning tasks, with Festo manufacturing the vision system hardware and application software.

Mark Worlidge, managing director of V-viz, said: 'To realise their full potential, vision systems need to be deployed very carefully and by proven experienced professionals, paying particular attention to factors such as the selection of correct lighting.

'On no account should such systems simply be shoehorned into machines - they need to be properly integrated and optimised to suit the application and their environment,' he added.

Festo will be supplying V-viz with its latest SBO intelligent vision systems.

Developed for use in factory automation, these compact smart camera systems feature built-in intelligence and control logic.

They can be supplied as wide-area-based systems for quality and inspection roles or set up to acquire high-quality images at very high speeds, without the need for a separate processor.

The high-speed versions of these cameras can be used for process monitoring and commissioning, recording the manufacturing processes, to identify operating problems and to aid the appropriate remedial action.

Festo's SBO vision systems are small high-speed cameras and are thought to be the only models available that are sealed to IP65/67 standard.

The quality-monitoring versions of the cameras offer short inspection times, thus enabling a high throughput.

Speed of setup is another key advantage, making 100 per cent quality inspection and a reduction of process downtime achievable in an industrial environment.

The high-speed camera is capable of accommodating frame rates as high as 2,000 per second to facilitate the monitoring of very fast motion sequences and is able to save acquired images as compressed jpeg files in order to minimise memory requirements.

In normal use, the camera records continuously - either saving the images to an internal ring buffer with a 10-second capacity or streaming them to an external hard drive - until instructed to stop by a trigger signal.

The vision systems feature an integral web server and can be networked via standard Ethernet.

They are controlled by an industry-standard PC.

A time synchronisation feature enables multiple camera installations to be set up and controlled in a very flexible manner.

Nigel Dawson, Festo product manager, believes that intelligent vision systems have a key role to play in helping manufacturers optimise their production processes.

He said: 'We are seeing increasing use of systems with integrated vision, motion and control functions.

'Many customers already use our SBO cameras for applications such as process monitoring, parts recognition, fault diagnosis and even in closed-loop configurations for dynamic process optimisation.

'But by far the largest application area is in accelerating quality control - by using intelligent vision systems to help reduce scrap rates and eliminate bottlenecks on production machinery, manufacturers can increase their productivity significantly,' added Dawson.

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