Vision Systems Design announces 2019 Innovators Awards

For the fifth straight year, Vision Systems Design held its Innovators Awards program, which celebrates the disparate and innovative technologies, products, and systems found in machine vision and imaging.

Based on the impartial ratings assigned by our panel of 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. Categories to distinguish our honorees include vision systems, four different camera categories, sensors, software, embedded vision, robotics, 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 fifth annual Innovators Awards Program, Vision Systems Design held a reception on the show floor of Automate on April 8, 2019 in Chicago, where many representatives from companies at the show were on hand to accept their awards from James Carroll, Editor, and Alan Bergstein Publisher of Vision Systems Design.

John Lewis, Editor in Chief, commented on this year’s recipients: “Each year, the types of products we see being honored grows and evolves alongside the machine vision market. This is an exciting snapshot of the current and future state of imaging.”

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:

Tom Brennan, President, Artemis Vision (Denver, CO, USA; www.artemisvision.com)
David Dechow, Principal Vision Systems Architect, Integro Technologies (Salisbury, NC, USA; www.integro-tech.com)
Dr. Daniel L. Lau, Kentucky Utilities Professor and Certified Professional Engineer, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY, USA; www.uky.edu).
Rex Lee, Ph.D., President and CEO, Pyramid Imaging (Tampa, FL, USA; www.pyramidimaging.com).
Bhaskar Ramakrishnan, Technical Sales Engineer, DWFritz Automation, Inc. (Wilsonville, OR, USA; www.dwfritz.com).
Nate Lim, Lead Vision Engineer, PVI Systems, Inc (Niantic, CT, USA; www.pvisys.com).
Robert Tait, Partner at Optical Metrology Solutions LLC (Niskayuna, NY, USA; www.opticalmetrologysolutions.com).
Rick van de Zedde, Senior researcher / business developer Computer Vision, Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research (Wageningen, Netherlands; www.wur.nl/en.htm).
Steve Varga, Principal Scientist, Imaging and Instrumentation R&D, Procter & Gamble USA (Cincinnati, OH, USA; www.us.pg.com).
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan Werling, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Mannheim Mechatronik (Stuttgart, Germany; www.dhbw.de/english/home.html)
Perry West, President, Automated Vision Systems, Inc. (San Jose, CA, USA; www.autovis.com).
Yury Yakubovich, Founder and Preisdent, NSIX Vision Inc. (Markham, ON, Canada; www.nsixvision.com)
Earl Yardley, Director, Industrial Vision Systems Ltd (Didcot, Oxfordshire, UK; www.industrialvision.co.uk).
Andy Wilson, Founding Editor of Vision Systems Design, European Editor for Vision Systems Design, Chiltern Editorial Services