More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, two things have become steadily clear: First, the overall trend associated with purchasing and deploying robots for applications such as process improvement and quality assurance continues, with stats from The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) showing a 20 percent increase in robot orders in Q1 2021 over the same period last year.

“Garbage in, garbage out” serves as a simple reminder that successful machine vision systems must start with quality data. Current challenges require flexible machine vision systems and models that can keep up with the speed of technology.

There is no question that the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically impacted business practices across industry segments worldwide. Manufacturing was no exception and 2021 will be the year of reinvention through an emphasis on transforming business models.

CoaXPress (CXP) has developed into a new standard in industrial image processing in recent years. The CXP interface, which is particularly relevant whenever high data rates and short latency periods are called for, is now available in a new version with more improvements.

An increasing number of manufacturers are turning to deep learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), to assist in image analysis processing, experts say.

Over the last couple of decades, stemming from changes in demand, competition, and market pressures, manufacturing has become a more complex and fraught affair requiring increased flexibility with a narrower margin of error. We can sum up this changing environment in three long-term trends affecting how stuff is designed and made: mass customization, increasing SKU proliferation, and shorter product cycles.