One of the more interesting conversations I had at Automate 2026 wasn’t about AI or robotics, but optics.
While AI dominated much of the show floor, advances in imaging hardware continue to play an equally important role in improving machine vision performance. At poLight’s stand, the company was demonstrating how its tunable lens technology is bringing fast electronic autofocus into industrial imaging, without the complexity traditionally associated with autofocus systems.
Although poLight has established itself in consumer electronics, bar code scanners and, more recently, smart glasses, the company is now applying the same technology to machine vision through its MLens® range of off-the-shelf autofocus lenses.
Speaking with MVPro Media during the show, Jon Edwards, Vice President of Business Development at poLight, explained that the company’s technology works very differently from conventional optics.
“Traditional optics use rigid, fixed lens surfaces,” he explained. “Our technology allows one of those surfaces to change shape, enabling us to alter the optical power of the lens and therefore control focus electronically.”
Instead of mechanically moving lens elements backwards and forwards, TLens® uses ultra-thin glass membranes, a high-quality optical polymer and piezoelectric actuation. Applying a small electrical signal changes the curvature of the lens itself, allowing focus to be adjusted extremely quickly while consuming very little power.
While that technology has been available for several years, what caught my attention at Automate was how much easier poLight is making it for machine vision engineers to adopt.
Historically, integrating tunable optics has generally meant working with custom optical designs, making the technology more suited to high-volume OEM projects. At Automate, however, poLight was showcasing its MLens family, a range of standard M12 autofocus lenses that integrate the TLens technology together with the company’s driver electronics into a ready-to-use package.
For many system builders, that could significantly reduce the barrier to evaluating tunable optics.
Edwards explained that many customers approaching poLight were asking for very similar optical specifications, leading the company to develop a catalogue range rather than treating every project as a bespoke design.
“We found many customers were coming to us with similar specifications,” he said. “So we developed MLens as an off-the-shelf machine vision lens.”
Each lens incorporates TLens autofocus technology, the PD50 driver IC and standardised mechanical and electrical interfaces, allowing system integrators to integrate autofocus with relatively little development work.
The significance of this is not simply convenience. It reflects how machine vision itself is changing.
Many inspection systems have traditionally relied on fixed-focus cameras with sufficient depth of field to accommodate variations in working distance. That approach works well but inevitably introduces compromise. Increasing depth of field generally means reducing the aperture, which also reduces the amount of light reaching the image sensor.
Electronic autofocus offers another option.
“By adding autofocus, you’re able to focus precisely on the object distance you want without compromising other parts of the imaging system,” Edwards explained. “We can do this at very low power, very high speed and with excellent stability.”
As robotics applications become more dynamic, that flexibility becomes increasingly valuable. Cameras mounted on robotic arms, autonomous mobile robots or automated inspection systems are often required to image objects at varying distances within the same cycle. Rather than relying on a large depth of field to keep everything acceptably sharp, autofocus allows the imaging system to adapt as the working distance changes.
Low power consumption is another advantage, particularly for battery-powered equipment such as AMRs, handheld scanners and portable inspection devices.
Another point Edwards highlighted was thermal stability.
Many conventional plastic optics experience focus drift as temperatures change, requiring either recalibration or acceptance of reduced image quality. poLight says its tunable lenses are designed to remain stable over temperature, an increasingly important characteristic in industrial environments where equipment may experience significant thermal variation.
Although much of poLight’s recent success has come from consumer and other applications, it is easy to see why the company is also targeting industrial vision. Many of the same characteristics that make the technology attractive for wearable devices, including compact size, low power consumption and fast response times, are equally valuable inside modern machine vision systems.
Ahead of Automate, poLight highlighted robotics, industrial automation and AI-driven inspection as key application areas for MLens. The company has also developed an ecosystem around the product, including evaluation kits, compatible camera modules and development platforms, making it easier for engineers to assess the technology before committing to production.
The initial MLens range comprises 6.6 mm, 7.5 mm, 13.6 mm and 19.7 mm focal lengths, all in the familiar M12 form factor commonly used throughout machine vision.
According to Edwards, that range is only the beginning.
“We’re going to continue developing these,” he said. “We’ll offer new focal lengths and potentially smaller form factors as well. We’ll continue responding to customer demand.”
Importantly, poLight has also structured its manufacturing to support both evaluation quantities and full production volumes.
“If somebody wants to buy just one, we’ll happily sell one,” Edwards said. “If somebody wants to buy ten thousand, we’ve got the capacity to do that as well.”
Walking around Automate this year, there was no shortage of AI software demonstrations promising smarter inspection and better decision making. What poLight’s stand served as a reminder of is that those algorithms are still entirely dependent on the quality of the image being captured in the first place.
Tunable optics will not replace every fixed-focus lens, nor do they need to. However, for applications where working distances vary, where cameras need to remain compact, or where power consumption is a concern, they offer an increasingly practical alternative.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from poLight’s presence at Automate was not the technology itself, but its accessibility. By packaging tunable optics into standard machine vision products, the company is making autofocus considerably easier for system integrators to evaluate and deploy than it has been in the past.
