Omron Industrial Automation and PCB Linear will present a live webinar Tuesday, Dec. 14, at 1 p.m. CST on how to “Overcome the Automation Challenges Where Motion and Vision Converge.” Food Manufacturing spoke with David Kaley, Commercial Marketing Manager for Omron Industrial Automation, to get an exclusive preview of the event.
Q: What are some of the challenges you plan to address during the webinar?
A: The webinar will consider how vision was implemented in the past and how that implementation has been changing. Vision used to be an after thought in a machine design and rarely did more than offer a “good” or “no good” message to the controller. Now vision is becoming an integral part of the motion solution by providing move coordinates and actively communicating with the controller to provide more accurate moves and more complex inspections. Inspections that might include “good” or “no good” as well as requests for the camera to move to a better vantage point and logging of data such as the bar code of the product being picked.
Q: What are some of the applications you will be discussing during the event?
A: Three applications will be discussed: The first will be an application where motion is used to aid the vision system in a rapid line change over for bottle inspection. The second application will highlight “Vision in Motion” for an automated lab application. The third application will depict a storage and retrieval system for an automated pharmaceutical dispensing machine.
Q: What are your clients most concerned about when it comes to motion and vision convergence?
A: Clients are most concerned with integration, product selection and design time. Products coming from multiple different vendors sometimes have communication challenges. Selecting the right hardware from the actuators, the glides and bearings and the control elements can be very time consuming, especially when working with products from multiple sources. Design time is often slowed down when customers need to deal with multiple customer service and technical support teams.
Q: What do you so in the future for motion control?
A: The future of motion control has already started with the introduction of “open” motion networks such as EtherCAT. More and more products are capable of hanging directly on the motion network, such as vision systems that can speak directly to the motion controller, sending motion coordinates. Additionally, more and more motion controllers will have a sequential logic function built into them, eliminating the need for a separate PLC in some applications.
Omron Industrial Automation can be reached at (866) 88-OMRON, [email protected] or www.omron247.com. PBC Linear can be reached at (888) 389-6266 or www.pbclinear.com. To register for the webinar, visit https://bit.ly/hV57yS.
