New vision sensors and systems

I must be awfully busy these days, because I missed the announcement from Baumer regarding their Verisens® vision sensors. Now you may be asking if the machine vision world really needs another sensor, so let me explain why I think this is an interesting new family of products.

Technically, there’s no new ground broken, but I like how one package offers everything from bar code reading all the way up scale of vision complexity to full part inspection. Now that’s not all in a single box, mind you. At the bottom of the range is the ID-100 for code reading. Then there’s the CS for presence/absence tasks, followed by the XF and XC for inspection.

These last two models incorporate Baumer’s FEXLoc® pattern-matching technology, so they have the ability to search for objects in an image. The XC goes a step further still by using a C-mount lens connection and offering sensors up to 2Mp. (The lesser models use 10 and 16mm lenses.) In other words, it’s a fully-fledged smart camera. The only omission from the range is any color capability, but I imagine that will come soon.

So in effect, the Verisens sensor appears to cover the Dataman, Checker, and InSight families from Cognex. And one of my pet gripes about the Cognex products is that they’re all stand-alone. In other words, you can’t, (or I haven’t figured out how to,) move an application from one product up to the next. With Verisens it’s my impression that upgrading would be considerably more straightforward.

So there you have it: an interesting vision sensor to smart camera product line from Baumer. Take a look.