PoE and a VGR application

I’m not a big fan of alphabet soup, so let me start by explaining those two acronyms. PoE is of course Power over Ethernet, the latest flavor of the GigE camera interface, and VGR stands for Vision Guided Robotics. And with that introduction out of the way, let’s talk about why they go together like a horse and carriage.

The advantage of PoE over regular GigE is that only a single cable is needed. In this regard it makes a GigE interface much like 1394/Firewire. And that’s of great interest to anyone wanting to mount a camera on the end of a robot arm. Fewer cables mean less weight and less to break.

These points and more are explored in “A Vision of Robot Reliability,” authored by Max Falcone of Comau and published on ControlDesign.com. The article is also a big ‘plug’ for Comau’s new machine vision package, RecogniSense, which I’m not familiar with but might be worth checking out.

The bottom line is that marrying a robot with a vision system can help reduce downtime, and so more than justify the additional expense. Sounds good to me.