There was one obvious trend at this year's highly successful VISION 2003 trade show, held in Stuttgart, Germany. Developers of automotive-inspection equipment are deploying low-cost smart image sensors with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and automated drives to offer manufacturers relatively low-cost automated inspection equipment. Nowhere was this more evident than at the booths of RVSI (Nashua, NH, USA) and Vision Components (Ettlingen, Germany). Both companies had the same idea regarding which of their systems-integrator applications to display at the show. For its part, RVSI invited Muko Maschinenbau (Waiblingen, Germany), a manufacturer of mi-cropercussion direct part-marking machines for quality control, automatic identification, and permanent traceability, to display a combined data matrix/marker and inspection system. At the Vision Components booth, systems-integrator AIT Gohner (Stuttgart, Germany) displayed a similar system that also used a smart camera as the basis for vision inspection of the data-matrix code.
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