Vision Guide 4.0
Vision Guide 4.0 |
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Vision Guide 4.0 runs under
Microsoft Windows 2000. We chose Microsoft Windows 2000 as our core
operating system platform because it is now the most commonly used operating
system in factories around the world due to its ease of use, support for a wide
variety of 3rd party boards and software and customer base of hundreds of
millions of users worldwide.
Most machine vision systems offered today
require the efforts of a professional software development engineer to
implement a solution. The Vision Guide environment is object based and consists
of a split screen where the left side is a live vision image, as seen by any
one of four cameras. The right side contains three TAB file folders which guide
the user through vision development without writing vision code. A series of
vision tools or OBJECTS such as BLOB Analysis, NORMALIZED CORRELATION and POLAR
SEARCH are available through easily recognizable Toolbar Buttons. With Vision
Guide, even those who are new to machine vision can develop real world robust
solutions in days vs. weeks or months with other systems.
Since the introduction of Vision Guide,
EPSON has continued to add new features and capabilities to make vision
guidance applications more robust while at the same time easy to develop. The
Geometric Search Tool is our latest such tool. The geometric search tool is
very powerful because it provides a robust search algorithm quite different
from any of the core tools of the past. The Geometric Search Tool is able to
find models with full 360 rotation with blazing speed and excellent precision.
It is also able to adjust for differences in scale vs. the original model. This
is highly valuable for parts that are not always presented with precisely the
same orientation or for parts that are out of scale even by just a few
percentage points. By creating a geometric model to be found, the Geometric
Search Tool is also excellent at finding parts that are partially blocked or
overlapped. We are finding that the Geometric Search Tool is now quickly
becoming the Search Tool of choice for a wide variety of applications. Give our
Applications Dept. a call to review your parts and let us show you how Vision
Guide can help solve your vision guidance application.
Vision Guide 4.0 camera calibration follows
the same basic premise as the Vision Guide 2.0 development environment... keep
it simple. The CALIBRATION Toolbar Button leads the user to a set up window
which then guides them through an automated routine for aligning the robot's
coordinate system with the vision camera's field of view. Cameras may be
mobile, mounted to the robot arm or fixed in place. Upon completion, all vision
results are available in pixel, camera and robot world coordinate frames. This
eliminates the need for coordinate manipulation from within the end user's
source code which is usually a source for many problems and frustrations with
other integrated vision system solutions not to mention that it can be quite
time consuming to get it right.
To initiate a vision inspection SEQUENCE from a SPEL+ robot program, the users need know only one command called VRUN. The VRUN command runs a vision sequence previously created through the Vision Guide 4.0 point and click user interface. Once the sequence is run, the user can then access the result values from the sequence by using the VGET command. The 3rd command which is commonly used is called VSET which allows the user to set parameters for the vision sequence prior to running it.
Our users really like the simplicity of the VRUN, VGET, and VSET SPEL+ commands as it keeps everything simple. Complex vision problems are now solved with a point and click interface and accessing the values returned from the vision computations is accomplished with only one SPEL+ statement. Ease of use and power is what it's all about.
