Alliance to forge new vision systems

Cognex has entered into a multi-year product development and OEM agreement with Accu-Sort Systems.

Cognex has entered into a multi-year product development and OEM agreement with Accu-Sort Systems.

Under the agreement, Cognex will develop new machine vision products to be used by Accu-Sort to automatically acquire images of packages moving by at high speeds on material handling lines, and then analyse those images in order to perform a variety of tasks.

For example, these new systems will be used for determining various physical package features, positioning, OCR, OCV and pattern matching.

The materials handling industry has historically used laser scanning systems to read bar code labels on products and packages in order to track them through manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping processes.

However, the industry is increasingly turning to the use of video camera-based scanning technology because it can provide additional information on the products that cannot be included in linear or two-dimensional barcodes.

Video scanning systems are capable of "seeing" the entire product or package - not just the barcode label.

With this added information, the scanner can even check the condition of the package or product to ensure that it is not damaged.

"Accu-Sort is the leading supplier of camera-based systems for bar code reading and dimensioning in the material handling industry, and Cognex is the world leader in developing robust machine vision software in a wide range of industries", said David Wurz, Chief Operating Officer of Accu-Sort.

"The combination of two vision system leaders brings unmatched experience and expertise to manufacturing, packaging and other industries.

We look forward to leveraging Cognex's leading edge vision technology to provide new services and capabilities to our customers".

"We are very excited to be working with Accu-Sort on this project, which builds on Cognex's proven expertise in pattern-recognition in high speed applications", said Dr Robert J Shillman, Cognex's President, CEO, and Chairman.

"This opportunity is an indication of how machine vision is continuing to expand into new industries and application areas as the technology develops and as the costs come down".

(This was Engineeringtalk's Top Story on 20 September 2002).

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