Network your machine vision systems

One of the unsung benefits of machine vision is its ability to capture data about your manufacturing process. Not only can it keep count of parts processed and quantity rejected, it can provide information on trends – dimensions, shades and so on – that can help with process improvement efforts.

One problem though is how you get this data out of the vision system, especially if you want to plug it in to a factory control system like SAP or use it directly in your quality reports.

That’s why I was interested in “When machines talk, will you listen?” published in Control Engineering February 2010. This piece discusses an initiative organized by a number of machine tool companies to standardize the way their controllers can provide performance data. This flies under the banner of MTconnect, and I think its something machine vision vendors should take a good look at.

Note that there’s no intention or desire to sell more hardware, the idea is really just to provide a standard xml interface and let the market figure out how to use it. This strikes me as an excellent idea and one that should create opportunities for the entrepreneurial types out there. Anything that makes it easier to get data out of a vision system has a lot of potential to save development time and effort.