Applications and technologies at the Italian Machine Vision Forum

Promoted by ANIE Automazione and organised by Messe Frankfurt Italia, the Italian Machine Vision Forum dedicated to industrial vision systems was held at Alzano Lombardo (BG) with broad participation

Maurizio Cacciamani

After the welcome greetings of Donald Wich, CEO of Messe Frankfurt Italia, Marco Vecchio, Secretary of ANIE Automazione, Aldo Peretti, President of the Italian Machine Vision Forum Scientific Committee and Giovanna Ricuperati, President of Confindustria Bergamo, the day’s proceedings began with the contribution of Anne Wendel, Director of Machine Vision Group VDMA with a Keynote speech titled “Machine Vision: key technology in the global automation race”. The forum continued with the round table, “Evoluzione dei sistemi di visione nella digital transformation” (Evolution of vision systems in the digital transformation) moderated by Riccardo Oldani (Open Factory Edizioni) with the participation of Luca Dieci (Barilla), Manuel Catalano (Italian Institute of Technology), Giambattista Gruosso (Politecnico di Milano) and Francesco Malapelle (Salvagnini Group).

Italian Machine Vision Award. The event ended with the awarding of the prize to Beckhoff Automation for the best paper with the title “Vision, Machine Learning and Automation” voted by the Scientific Committee. Special mentions were assigned to the contributions of Basler Italy and Opto Engineering.

Ideas for the packaging sector

The forum was arranged in two sessions: one dedicated to applications and moderated by Francesco Malapelle; the other focused on technologies, moderated by Emanuele Croci (Nuova Idropress). Among the reports presented, we highlight those most relevant to the world of packaging.

Silvano Scaccabarozzi (Vision) presented a flexible and high-speed Robot-Guidance system able to command a Delta robot (but also a Scara, anthropomorphic or Cartesian robot) for picking up pieces on a conveyor belt at a speed for 150 pieces/min. The system, which requires extensive integration between various components, is composed of a high-speed and high-resolution video camera, vision algorithms and smart recognition (AI also available on request), encoder for dynamic synchronization with the conveyor belt, interface with the robot, and PC for system control in real time, monitoring and diagnostics. The system has to guarantee high precision despite the speed of the conveyor belt and the density of the pieces, managing any variations in the size or shape of the pieces, optimising both the vision software and programming of the robot.

Mattia Alberto Salomao (Visionlink) talked about "How to improve the logistics of a warehouse with the integration of vision systems". According to Salomao, the benefits of adopting systems such as 1D, 2D and OCR code reading, multi video camera or 3D Time of Flight or structured light vision systems or those with laser profiler increase productivity (more rapid and efficient operations), reducing errors and improve environmental impact (optimisation of shipments reduces pollution while that of packaging reduces the dispersion of polluting materials). Applications also in the food sector.

Matteo Ferrari (Opto Engineering) explained how to detect the invisible thanks to polarised vision and SWIR. SWIR (Short Wave InfraRed), incidentally, is a subset of the infrared band in the electromagnetic spectrum, which characterizes waves with a wavelength of 900 nm to 2500 nm not visible to the naked eye. After outlining the characteristics of SWIR, Ferrari moved on to describe the technologies of sensors that make it possible to detect the reflectance and absorbance of materials in order to differentiate them according to their spectral signature: very useful in the selection of foods, waste materials and in the detection of contaminants in the pharmaceutical sector.

Simone Pavan (ifm electronic) in his contribution, "Evoluzione della Tecnologia Time-of-Flight nella Visione Artificiale 3D" (Evolution of Time-of-Flight technology in 3D Artificial Vision) presented two application examples in the field of logistics and autonomous vehicles regarding Obstacle Detection Systems (ODS) and Pallet Detection Systems (PDS) with both technical challenges (obstacles, floors, false positives, pallets...) and operational challenges that are not easy to resolve. TOF technology makes it possible to calculate the distance between the observer and an object by knowing the time used by a light signal to travel the distance between the observer and the same object, using light in the same way that bats use sound for echolocation.