Providing the right vision sensor for robotic applications which provide maximum functional and operational flexibility combined with easy process integration has become an increasingly important focus for sensing and instrumentation specialists BAUMER. Their expertise in this area of making robots ‘see’ has recently been acknowledged by the jury of the 2021 ‘Inspect Awards’ which every year honours the most innovative products in the field of industrial image processing. Out of the 9 finalist products Baumer VeriSens XF/XC900 vision sensors were awarded first place in the ‘Vision’ category.
Among the important features of VeriSens sensors it was the intelligent calibration target SmartGrid (patent pending) innovation with its Chessboard application of the bit pattern, which proved pivotal in their success in the awards. Crucially for robot operators the SmartGrid feature not only enables unique automated coordinate alignment it also eliminates the conventional issues and limitations of manual ‘hand-eye’ coordination. The result is that only a few minutes are needed to give ‘eyesight’ to Universal Robots and at a higher accuracy in parallel.
In addition, the SmartGrid feature supports automatic teaching of image rectification for image distortion correction in real time. Basically, a simple mouse click will suffice in eliminating any impairments by lens or mounting, without affecting the following processing time. Also the teaching of 3D orientation enables automatic adjustment to distance. When converted to World coordinates VeriSens is receiving the scaling specifications directly via the SmartGrid.
Installation and calibration of these vision sensors is simplified via the VeriSens URCap interface specifically developed by Baumer to optimise robot control. Only a few steps are required to ensure the benefits of the diverse range of image processing options that this interface provides.
For the programming of the robot, only two additional commands (nodes) are necessary to realise the benefits and advantages of vision guided robotics across a wide range of control applications.
Set-up and calibration is also simplified because instead of pre-determined waypoints, free positions are used on which objects are then visually recognised while the already established functions are able to check for object overlaps and gripper clearances. Furthermore, VeriSens sensors can also be used for additional functions such as verifying free storage areas, fulfilling quality controls of objects which are in various positions, as well as identifying and measuring objects.