For the fourth straight year, Vision Systems Design held its Innovators Awards program, which celebrates the disparate and innovative technologies, products, and systems found in the machine vision and imagingmarket.
Based on the impartial ratings assigned by our judges, awards were assigned in four different levels-Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum, to companies or organizations that demonstrated excellence in a product or technology, an application, or in research and development. This year, we added categories to distinguish our honorees, which include vision systems, four different camera categories, sensors, software, embedded vision, a research and development/start-up category, and more.
Submissions were judged on originality; innovation; their impact on designers, systems integrators or users; whether they fulfilled a new market need; leveraged a novel technology and/or increased productivity.
To celebrate our fourth annual Innovators Awards Program, Vision Systems Design held a reception on the show floor of The Vision Show 2018 on April 10, 2018, where many representatives from companies at the show were on hand to accept their awards from John Lewis, Editor-in-Chief and Alan Bergstein Publisher of Vision Systems Design.
John Lewis, Editor in Chief, commented on the 2018 recipients: "The 2018 group of honorees provides a great look at where we stand in the machine vision market today, as this year we saw easily the most unique collection of cutting edge products and solutions in our awards program to date."
Our panel of expert judges consisted of systems integrators, consultants, and academics with years of experience in specifying, designing and configuring image processing and machine vision systems. This year’s judges were as follows:
- Craig M. BorsackPresident, G2 Technologies
- Tom BrennanPresident, Artemis Vision
- Shawn A. Campion, President and CEO, Integro Technologies
- David DechowStaff Engineer, Intelligent Robotics/ Machine Vision, FANUC America Corporation
- Tom HermaryPresident, Hermary Opto Electronics Inc.
- Dr. Daniel L. Lau, Kentucky Utilities Professor and Certified Professional Engineer, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Kentucky
- Rex Lee, President and CEO, Pyramid Imaging
- Bhaskar Ramakrishnan,Technical Sales Engineer, DWFritz Automation, Inc.
- William SchrammPresident, PVI Systems, Inc
- Robert Tait Partner at Optical Metrology Solutions LLC
- Rick van de Zedde, Senior researcher / business developer Computer Vision, Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research
- Steve VargaPrincipal Scientist, Imaging and Instrumentation R&D, Procter & Gamble USA
- Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan WerlingBaden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Mannheim Mechatronik
- Perry WestPresident, Automated Vision Systems, Inc.
- Earl YardleyDirector, Industrial Vision Systems Ltd
- Andy Wilson Founding Editor of Vision Systems Design, European Editor for Vision Systems Design, Chiltern Editorial Services
Submissions were evaluated for:
- Originality
- Innovation
- Impact on designers, systems integrators, end users
- Fulfilling a need in the market that hasn’t been addressed
- Leveraging a novel technology
- Increasing productivity
Next page: Bronze-level honorees
First page | Bronze level | Silver level | Gold level | Platinum level
About the Author
James Carroll
Former VSD Editor James Carroll joined the team 2013. Carroll covered machine vision and imaging from numerous angles, including application stories, industry news, market updates, and new products. In addition to writing and editing articles, Carroll managed the Innovators Awards program and webcasts.