July August hi-res with ads

www.machineryupdate.co.uk JULY/AUGUST 2018 MACHINERY UPDATE 53
Feature: Automation, robotics and vision
New vision-guided
robots will become
future child’s play
Neil Sandhu, Sick’s UK
product manager for
imaging & ranging
believes setting a
robot to work on the
repeatable, relentless tasks that
no-one else wants to do, will simply
become child’s play in the future.
Perhaps, like me, you have
nostalgic childhood memories of
playing ‘pick up sticks’ when stuck
indoors on long rainy afternoons
in the school holidays, he says.
You may even remember ‘Jack
Straws’, a version of the game
where you had to pick up mini
plastic spades, tools, crutches and
swords from a pile, one at a time,
using a tiny metal hook.
Even quite a small child has
the keen eyesight and dexterity
to remove the uppermost piece
from a pile of randomly arranged
objects without disturbing any
of the others.
You might think that this
natural human talent would be
the ultimate task for a robot to
match. Certainly, it would take
a great deal of money, programming
complexity and sophisticated,
heavyweight hardware to try
to replicate it. But then, ask the
human to repeat that task again
and again, without a break,
24-hours a day and the robot might
start to get the upper hand.
SYMBIOTIC DEVELOPMENT
Vision and robotics technologies
have always developed
symbiotically. The latest advances
have brought us lightweight and
user-friendly collaborative robots,
or cobots – affordable, easyset-up
articulated ‘arms’ that can
be deployed and re-deployed on
multiple applications without
programming knowledge.
At the same time, imaging
cameras have become selfcontained
‘smart’ devices onto
which vision functionality can
be downloaded – just like a mobile
phone app – without the user
having to do any development.
Robots are
seeing more
Sick’s Inspector
PIM60 2D vision
sensors have been
integrated with
Universal robots
to deliver an
adaptable
vision-guided
cobot capability
that is easy to
program
At Sick, we have developed a whole
environment called AppSpace to
enable this.
Sick Inspector PIM60 2D vision
sensors have been integrated
with Universal cobots to deliver
an adaptable vision-guided cobot
capability that is quick and easy
to program and configure without
the need for a separate PC or
specialist software expertise.
After a quick set-up through the
user-friendly interface on the robot,
the Sick PIM60 URCAP outputs
co-ordinates to the robot controller,
as well as enabling inspection
Our developments are the
first steps in more widespread
use of vision-guided robots
and measurement tasks, and
providing diagnostic data on
pass/fail or trending.
The company has launched
two further self-contained visionguided
systems for two of the most
common robot-guidance tasks that
are suitable for both cobots and
conventional industrial robots.
The first, Sick PLB Hi Res is based
on a stereoscopic vision camera to
enable vision-guided bin picking
applications of much smaller
objects than previously possible.
The PLOC2D is an easy set-up
vision system for 2D localisation
of parts, products or packages
to be picked from a moving belt,
or feeder system.
And these developments are just
the first steps in more widespread
use of vision-guided robots.
T 01727 831121
W www.sick.co.uk