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How Can Robot Vision Help to Automate Your Business?

cobot arm and its camera

Article by Astra Lee

Facing The Gap: Humans vs. Robots

Complicated tasks can become simple and organized with the capability of detection, recognition, and classification. We, human beings who are born naturally with sight, enables us to explore surrounding with ease. One of the methods to decrease the gap between humans and robots is by giving robots a pair of eyes.

            “If we want machines to think, we need to teach them to see” — Fei-Fei Li

The purpose of introducing robot is to decrease labor costs and improve productivity and quality consistency, whereas a cobot (collaborative robot) aims to provide a safe and collaborative working environment that can work alongside humans. So how can cobots learn to understand its environment? It sure requires using sensing equipment such as force sensor, laser, or camera (vision system), to obtain information from its external surroundings. Therefore, for vision inspection, a camera becomes a connection between robots and co-workers.

Do You Need to Use Robotic Vision?

Let us take a look at some demands you might have:

  1. Repeated tasks with imprecise positioning & compensation
  2. Inconsistent production quality
  3. High operation and maintenance costs
  4. The need to create a custom coordinate system by using tags/markers
  5. Need help identifying custom shapes of objects, decoding barcodes, classifying colors, or matching texts and images

If one of your answers is yes, then robot vision is a suitable solution for your business.

Maximizing the Values of Automation Business: Cobot + Robotic Vision

Cobots in production line
The combination of Cobot + Vision is one of the most commonly used and effective automation solution in today’s factory

Whenever involving with automation, robotic vision adds new potential values and maps those values to the robot. These values can enhance the robot system to achieve a wide variety of applications, such as AGVelectronic assemblyglue dispensingpick-and-placecreative interactions, and much more.

Having a camera on your production line is a standardized requirement in automation factories nowadays. However, the general mounting installation for cameras is not as efficient when the production process require you to relocate the robot or modify the production line layout. Thus, having a cobot with vision becomes very handy, especially with its great flexibility to be placed anywhere and relocated afterwards. Such cobot can be installed and deployed in a very short time. This is how a pre-integrated vision system (both hardware and software) can be quickly and easily implemented in any factory.

 

editing flow in user software of TM Robot
In TMflow, the vision function(TMvision) is built as a node which you can call out and add it anywhere in your project flow

At Techman Robot, we offer cobots with a built-in 2D camera that is integrated with user-friendly software called TMflow. By using its smart vision function (vision node), it can save great costs for “cobot + robotic vision” integration, as well as implementation time. If you are interested in a stand-alone cobot solution, you can start your automation journey here.