America Back to Work


America Back to Work

The end of summer means back to work for many people. Luckily this fall, the change of season is not the only force bringing people back to the workforce. Recent headlines are filled with feel good stories surrounding a revival of the manufacturing industry in North America. Since its low point in 2010, the manufacturing sector has created 500,000 new jobs. There are a number of factors contributing to this revival in North America. Foreign products have become less price competitive due to increasing wages in overseas labor and transportation costs. The need for tighter supply chain management, faster turnaround and time to market, as well as the ability to rapidly customize products all point in favour of sticking with a local manufacturing company instead of outsourcing overseas. Last, but not least, another contributing factor that I want to explore in further detail with you is increased manufacturing efficiency through the deployment of advanced machine vision and robotics.

Simply put, machine vision enables the production of high quality products at lower costs. In a manufacturing setting, machine vision systems offer a fast and efficient method of inspecting and identifying parts, accurately measuring dimensions, or guiding robots or other machines during pick-and-place and other assembly operations. These systems can be found in a variety of industries including: semiconductor, electronics, pharmaceuticals, packaging, medical devices, automotive and consumer goods. Users of these machine vision systems range from factory floor operators and engineers who typically set up, install or modify vision applications, to system integrators or OEM’s who create custom vision applications or even develop new vision tools.

Recent advances in this technology are emerging from two main areas:

1) There’s a number of high resolution, high-speed global shutter CMOS sensors being introduced to the market that compare to the performance of CCD sensors, but at a much higher frame rate.
2) Standardized data interfaces such as USB 3.0 or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) can deliver higher data throughput in a simpler and more cost-effective solution than the peculiar machine vision specific interfaces of the past. The ability to capture, process and then analyze the fine details of high-speed, high-resolution images in one step would have required multiple components before the introduction of these interfaces.

Before these technologies, many manufacturing processes that could have benefited from automated inspection would have faced many barriers to this solution, like the high price point and complexity of a machine vision system. The use of consumer friendly technology such as Ethernet and USB 3.0 have made systems easy to use, shortened deployment times and made solutions more affordable and truly accessible. These new systems provide manufacturing environments with the flexibility to allow rapid changes in product lines and meet supply demands.