MU July / August 2016

www.machineryupdate.co.uk JULY/AUGUST 2016 MACHINERY UPDATE 57
Feature: Automation, robotics and vision
Intelligent sensing
advances are now
mirrored in robots
3D vision has been
liberated and has
shrugged off the
shackles of its
exclusive past and is
being delivered into the hands of
the many; now more accessible,
affordable and easier to install and
commission,” says Neil Sandhu,
national product manager –
Imaging, Measurement & Ranging
at Sick UK.
These advances in intelligent
sensing are finding synergies
with parallel developments in
collaborative robotics and factorywide
communications.
The opportunities are there for
the taking and for food, fmcg and
packaging industries; easier 3D
may accelerate greater robot
adoption, he argues.
More than anything, robots need
to have ‘eyes’ to operate successfully.
But, in the past, using full 3D
vision has been limited by the large
amounts of data generated and the
slow processing speeds. Now, at
last, 3D vision truly can be ‘plug and
play – out of the box’ even for robot
integration. The recently launched
Sick TriSpector 1000, for example,
can be set up without bespoke
program writing, yet its functionality
supports quality inspection and
high speed production control.
The processes of calibration and
co-ordinate transformation are fully
integrated in the sensor, so it can be
installed and connected to a robot
controller in minutes.
ACCURATE CALCULATION
Critically, 3D vision offers the ability
to accurately calculate the depth
and 3D profile of an object in x,
y and z axes to support reliable
robot gripping and to cope with
components with curved or more
complex profiles.
At a well-known bakery, Sick’s
IVC3D vision system supports
various stages of the production
process. Here, 3D scanning of the
baked loaves prior to wrapping tells
3D vision is
now set free
The Sick IVC-3D
images the bread
prior to wrapping
to detect size and
location for the
robot on the line
the robots the width, length, height
and volume and enables them to
calculate the centre of each loaf,
to guide the gripping arm to pick
up the loaf at the optimum point,
as well as to reject any over-sized
loaves of bread.
Similarly, the wrapped bread is
loaded into supermarket trays as
it travels down a conveyor, with
another Sick camera giving the
3D co-ordinates to the robot for it to
load into the tray.
In each case, using 3D vision
means the co-ordinate data is
calculated and sent in the three x,
y and z axes. The ‘z’ axis or height
Today, 3D vision can be
truly ‘plug and play’ to make
their adoption even simpler
plane tells the robot how far down
to pick up the bread accurately;
too far and the bread could be
damaged, not far enough and the
loaf could be dropped.
IMAGE ANALYSIS
Complete image analysis is carried
on board the device to determine
size, location and set tolerances.
An Ethernet interface and a simple
calibration wizard make it easy to
calibrate and communicate
the data to the robot’s inbuilt
co-ordinate system.
In future, robots will
increasingly have to make sense
of more randomly-positioned and
varied products and flexibility
is paramount to support
greater product diversification,
customisation and smaller
production batches, says Sandhu.
T 01727 831121
W www.sick.co.uk