Braintech: Intelligent Vision

The last time we spoke, I attempted to shine some light on the nature of random bin picking and why we think this to be such an important growth market for vision guided robotics. We talked about the fact that RBP applications are present in virtually every industry since jumbled heaps of parts and components need to be transported and fed into machines for processing and assembly everywhere. Since last post our work has intensified even further in this area as we are increasingly seeing strong interest from major manufacturers who are anxious to get the technology working on their plant floor. As you know we released the first commercial version of the random bin picking software back in December of 2007. Since that time we have been focused on optimizing the functionality of the RBP software in the context of an application introduced by Toyota Motor, which involves picking engine components from a jumbled bin. Areas of improvement include faster part recognition and ease of system configuration. As we get closer to a pilot installation, the work increasingly involves our engineers closely collaborating with counterparts at ABB as ABB puts together and validates the entire working RBP pilot system for deployment into the field. In addition to the work being done on the Toyota project we are seeing serious interest from other manufacturers, which provides us with the chance to test the technology on new parts and further evolve the underlying technology. Please stay tuned.

Power to the People

Ever since Braintech got involved in our first project at TI Automotive locating fuel tanks for plastic welding about 8 years ago-yes, the fuel tank in your car is made of plastic- Braintech’s scientists and engineers have been laying the technological foundation for industrial strength robot vision.

Braintech coined the term Vision Guided Robotics (VGR) early in its development and stayed focused on the robot vision market while competitors continued their focus on legacy vision inspection applications. As a result even today, many technologies available from eVF are still absent or only available in basic form in competitor’s offerings - including those from large corporations. Having said this, until now the primary beneficiary of these technologies has been the automotive industry through our strategic partnership with ABB. In truth however, many of these vision capabilities are just as useful to a robot toiling away in a white goods factory or an aerospace plant as they are to a robot putting Ford F-150 truck engines together. Following along this line of thinking we have expanded our business development activities to seek out new practical applications for our technologies in other markets.

Some examples of non-automotive applications include a recent sensitive material handling installation at a major pharmaceutical company and a new system currently in preliminary phases which would use an industrial robot for automated armament assembly in the defense space. Another example involves our push into the edutainment robotics space with products that would add vision and recognition capabilities to education and entertainment robots. On this front we are excited about the introductory release of two new products iSpot Vision Server and BlueVision camera announced on May 8th. In the upcoming blog posts I will talk about these new products and the very significant consumer and edutainment robotics market. In the mean time please visit our iSpot & BlueVision product page to see an overview of this exciting ‘duo’.

As the R&D sibling of the Braintech family we are determined to fully support our business and solution development brothers and sisters in different markets and therefore a major theme of our development moving forward will be to bring the power of our technologies to increasingly more people. The people we want to empower include both Braintech internal and third party frontline individuals and firms that touch the customer everyday and are intimately familiar with the applications to be solved or products to be manufactured. To this end we have taken steps to package our core science and technologies into forms that are usable by a wider audience of solution and product developers in various industries.

I hope to elaborate on some of these efforts in the coming posts.

Best Regards,

Babak Habibi
CTO