Robot Vision

If you're in an industrial setting using Machine Vision you will probably find an Adept robot at work. The company has spent many years interfacing their robots with vision based tools to allow for identification and assembly of parts. One of the most basic problems with industrial assembly is a process know as parts feeding. In this scenario objects/parts that are required for product assembly are contained in a large bin. The assembly process requires a single part to be isolated from the bin of parts. Adept has pioneered the use of vision in solving this part picking problem.
One of the most fundamental tasks that vision is very useful for is the recognition of objects (be they machine parts, light bulbs, DVDs, or your next door neighbor!). Evolution Robotics introduced a significant milestone in the near-realtime recognition of objects based on SIFT points. The software identifies points in an image that look the same even if the object is moved, rotated or scaled by some small degree. Matching these points to previously seen image points allows the software to 'understand' what it is looking at even if it does not see exactly the same image.