You’ve been tasked with integrating a machine vision system. What does integration entail? This article covers the activities you will typically have to handle when integrating a vision system.

Manufacturers and brand owners are under tremendous pressure to ensure premium end-to-end product quality, especially as consumers increasingly demand perfection. And a great deal of that product quality pressure still falls on human visual inspection.

Imaging sensors in the machine vision space have traditionally fit into cameras utilizing only a couple of different camera mounts. However, newer sensors are beginning to grow far too large. Lens and camera manufacturers need to collaborate to develop new mounting standards for the new, large sensor formats.

Machine vision solutions help advance quality by recognizing defects at more efficient rates than humans can, making for more consistent and faster production cycles. 

The highest volumes of machine vision cameras being sold are those that are small in size and small or small-ish in price. This demand has resulted in a wide array of compact, affordable cameras being created by many different manufacturers.

Machine vision for quality assurance (QA) has allowed manufacturers to overcome the limitation of human inspection in terms of cost and reliability. However, machine vision projects can be extremely complex and not suited to the technical and financial resources of most businesses.

Cameras are the eyes of visual quality inspection systems. Cameras and machine vision technologies help to improve quality by automating processes, making them more precise and repeatable, while also boosting their speed and throughput.

According to the latest statistics from the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), the first six months of 2021 saw an 18 percent increase to $1.5 billion over the same period in 2020, which is the best start to a year on record. And those numbers aren’t expected to decline. Why the increase?

Whether they are going mobile or adding artificial intelligence, a range of robots are appearing on the manufacturing floor - and more are on the way.

While artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining favor as a solution to quality problems, it brings a number of new, sometimes confusing, terms. As a first step, many manufacturers ask “What is AI?”