Safety First

For years, image processing has only marginally dealt with the subject of safety. Although there are solutions from Pilz and Sick that safely monitor defined protected areas in production using cameras, unfortunately neither system has really caught on. However, there may be new movement on the vision safety market, because while the first two solutions mentioned were based purely on the evaluation of camera images, two companies are now presenting completely new approaches for these applications: tofmotion with a time-of-flight approach and Inxpect with an ultrasonic solution, both of which are already SIL-certified. In times of constantly increasing numbers of robots and cobots, there is certainly nothing wrong with having solutions for these growth markets in our portfolio.