MELFA VISION – a new robot program from Mitsubishi Electric

Ratingen - Mitsubishi Electric’s new MELFA VISION program is a user-friendly configuration tool that enables fast installa-tion of industrial image processing systems for use with the company’s robots. The program was developed specially for the In-Sight 5000 series from Cognex, a leading manufacturer of vision systems. MELFA Vision is being launched at the Motek 2007 trade show in Stuttgart.

MELFA VISION from Mitsubishi Electric simplifies the configuration and installation of the universal image processing sensors manu-factured by Cognex. The program’s features an intuitive graphical menu interface and requires no programming skills. Calibration of the installed Mitsubishi Electric robot system and the selected In-Sight camera is performed in a few steps that can be completed in minutes. Precise, camera-assisted robot integration can be imple-mented quickly and easily, even for demanding image processing applications. This reduces installation overheads and cuts costs.

There is a very wide range of potential factory automation applica-tions for small industrial robots supported by cameras. They in-clude component assembly, quality control, workpiece finishing and reworking and even identifying and picking objects on moving conveyors. A single camera can guide up to three robots and each robot can process data from up to seven cameras.

Data is transferred between the robot and the camera via an Ethernet connection using TCP/IP (Transmission Control Proto-col/Internet Protocol), which ensures fast communication between the robot controller and the image processing sensors. The robot can move to the positions identified by the data delivered by the sensor immediately.

Any other camera systems can also be connected to Mitsubishi Electric’s industrial robots via the Ethernet or RS-232 port of the robot controller and used for object identification with standard programming methods.

Caption:

The graphical menu system of Mitsubishi Electric’s MELFA VISION program makes it easy to configure the Cognex vision system for Mitsubishi’s robots.

Courtesy of  Mitsubishi Electric