After a record-breaking Automate show which saw 867 exhibitors—up 13% from the previous year, let’s look back at IDS Imaging’s booth, a highlight of our four-day visit to the trade show.
We met with David Mayers, who showed us some of IDS’s innovations. He explained that IDS has three pillars in its business: area scan cameras, 3D cameras, and cameras with AI.
IDS demonstrated their Ensenso N-36 camera, a stereo vision camera which was projecting a pattern down. They worked with TM Robot to point cloud information around the parts to perform pick-and-place applications. This camera has immensely high accuracy, making it ideal for pick-and-place tasks.
David revealed which industries IDS have engaged with most recently, saying:
“Logistics is still growing for us. We’re starting to see a lot of alternative applications for this such as in medical surgeries, robot guidance, and even dental applications for the measurement of teeth.”
David then showed us their NXT camera line, which boasts several onboard features. It has an imaging pipeline built in, allowing users to develop apps and load them onto the camera. This can be used for barcode reading, and in the deep learning space, as the camera can run convolutional neural networks on board.
We were also treated to a sneak peek at an upcoming product, IDS’ new XCP camera, which features an event-based sensor from Prophesee. The camera is highly valuable in measuring frequency and trajectory.
David walked us through the demonstration, saying, “We’ve got it looking at a speaker, and there’s some water on here. This can measure the frequency in which the speaker is running.”
It can also be used to measure the trajectory of objects by scanning the X and Y coordinates over time, such as with a golf ball. David explained that his can also be used in an autonomous driving application where the user might need to look at objects in their path.
David gave us an idea of the product’s release date:
“It is not available now, but it will likely be released in 6-8 months. We’re showing it as a technology demonstration here at Automate, and will be releasing it sometime in late 2024 or early 2025.”
Lastly, David introduced us to another solution they partnered with DENKNet to produce. It is a strong AI-based software for traditional AI-based image classification, including segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation.
David added:
“This is coming to North America imminently The optical character recognition on here is exceptional. It’s better than we’ve seen anyone else doing. That’s a software solution we’ll be offering soon and perhaps in the future, maybe more built into our products.
