Vision technology

'We gave eyes to a robot'

Adding vision technology to a robot system opens a world of opportunities. Besides the automatic welding which KRANENDONK has been doing for years, now assembly can be added. KRANENDONK used the vision system for the assembling of flanges to pipes and placing of stiffeners and plates in beam.

In the development and application of vision technology, many skills are combined: software development, mathematics, optics and hardware engineering. The challenge lays in the accuracy in which the assembly has to occur. The system has to work within a few millimeters of deviation. Another challenge is the communication between the vision tool and the robot. The tooling and robot are constantly moving and do not have a fixed reference point. Therefore it is difficult to translate the information gathered by the vision tool to the robot.