Ahead of the Trend: SAC at VISION 2018

‘Be Visionary’ was the motto when the latest trends in the industry were presented at the world’s leading trade fair for machine vision, which was held from 6 to 8 November in Stuttgart, Germany.

“3D inspection, OPC UA, and deep learning are hot topics right now.” says Markus Oßwald, head of development at SAC. “Modern production systems place increased demands on machine vision systems, especially in terms of quality, integration in control systems, easy operability, process management, and traceability. There are efforts to establish a process-oriented view on inspections. Products must be matched to one another, and software tools must be provided to better meet these requirements.”

During the Industrial VISION Days, Mr. Oßwald also gave a talk on ‘Advanced 3D Inspection in Product Lifecycle Management’: “We tailor our products exactly to these new requirements. Beside the focus on products, we also try to make the production process tangible. It must be possible to quickly identify and localize production fluctuations.”

The SAC booth presented a fitting exhibit: the ‘3D inspection of brake shoes’ based on the SAC structured-light scanner system Pulsar and the image-processing software Coake® 7.

Furthermore, SAC presented an ‘OPC UA demonstrator’ at VISION: Based on OPC UA, communication and interface standards that guarantee data exchange irrespective of the manufacturer have been defined. SAC participated actively in this process over the past few months. “We wanted to get a grasp on the underlying concepts right from the outset because that is the only way to successfully implement new standards and technologies in an industry 4.0 environment.” says Oßwald.

The exhibits at the SAC booth were also interconnected. Visitors could view the connection status of the exhibits on a screen. “In an actual production scenario, you could monitor the production process with these data.” Beside a good/bad counter, the screen also displayed information on the cycle time and the processing time. “This way I can monitor the speed of production and the performance of my inspection machine.” says Oßwald.

The subject of deep learning is also not unknown to SAC. Just recently, SAC collaborated with KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and supervised a master's thesis that dealt with ‘Machine Vision and Artificial Intelligence.’