Dreams and Challenges
The past year has witnessed a tremendous rebound in the machine-vision industry, exceeding the recovery in the general economy following the recession. At its annual January business conference in Orlando, FL, the Automated Imaging Association estimated that sales in the North American machine-vision market had risen more than 50% in 2010, which will put it back on its traditional historical trend line of growth over the past decade of 2.8%.
The conference speakers had other good news about the machine-vision market, including a forecast by Lakshman Achuthan of ECRI that 2011 should be a good year, but with some possible “clouds” on the horizon in 2012. Achuthan, who studies recessions and recoveries and anticipates turning points in industries and national economies, is one of the few economists credited with foreseeing the 2008–09 recession.
For energizing speakers at the conference, it was hard to top Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of X Prize Foundation, who talked about his mission to inspire and help fund radical innovation in technologies such as private space flight, autonomous vehicles, medical diagnostics, and personal robotics.
The awarding of prizes in an effort to inspire innovation dates to at least the early 18th century, when the British Parliament created a series of prizes that led to the accurate measurement of longitude. Many X Prizes—from which the well-known DARPA Challenge to create autonomous vehicles took inspiration—involve machine vision and attract small groups of highly motivated engineers.
Inspired engineering
Motivated engineers are continuing to offer advances in machine vision such as those described in this issue. These include articles about a new version of the GigE Vision standard, a machine-vision workstation that inspects tubular solar modules, cameras for flat-panel display inspection, and scanners for fast 3-D image reconstruction.
The challenges for the machine-vision industry in the coming years will be to take advantage of ever-increasing computer power, improve software algorithms, and develop innovative product designs. For our part, Vision Systems Design will be publishing a report about one of the most fascinating and fast developing technological areas. The report, “Vision for Service Robots: Current and Emerging Technologies, Applications, and Markets,” will be available soon and should help inspire manufacturers of machine-vision components, system integrators, OEMs, and the robotics community.
W. Conard Holton, Editor in Chief
[email protected]
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