3D Sensor: Counting Doughnuts, Reading Tires, and a Rambling Lemming

"DS1000 3D Sensor for the Food and Beverage Industries"

CognexTV, YouTube (June 7, 2013) video, 1:45

"DS1000 3D Sensor for the Food and Beverage Industries"

"3D laser profiling food and beverage manufacturing applications include: identifying improperly filled packages by verifying object heights, detecting defects like skewed caps, and measuring volume and dimensions to verify portion size, to name a few."

The Lemming spent most of yesterday listening to folks talk about assorted gizmos, gadgets, and thingamajigs: and industrial robots. Rethink Robotic's Baxter was there, too, but that's not what's on the Lemming's mind today. Not so much, anyway.

For the Lemming, spending a day looking at actuators, valves, and industrial control components; and listening to folks talking about ROI, HMI, and OCR, is a nice break in routine. Your experience might vary.

Cognex has two more videos, showing why that yellow and black box is a good thing to have in the automotive and electronics industry, too. One of its not-so-obvious tricks is reading embossed lettering or numbers: like DOT codes on car tires, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

That 'food and beverage industry' video gives a quick run-through of how the DS1000 3D Sensor can 'see' if there's the right number of doughnuts in a try, and measure the volume of portions. There's more, but the Lemming figures you've probably got time to look at a one-and-three-quarters-minute video: no voice, but they've got some pretty good music.

The Lemming likes it, anyway.

Remembering the Will-be that Was

HAL "Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this...."
("2001: A Space Odyssey," via imdb.com)

Back in the Lemming's 'good old days,' computers and robots were common: in science fiction stories. Somehow the evil scientists never learned that robot minions generally turned on their masters, and that's another topic.

Now that the Lemming is living in 'the future,' flying cars have been invented several times, and still haven't caught on.

Robots are showing up in more places every year, but so far they've shown a remarkable lack of ambition: compared to their fictional counterparts, that is. Which, in the Lemming's opinion, is just as well.

Vaguely-related posts:

• "Robird: False Falcons, Ersatz Eagles, and a Rambling Lemming"
  (September 5, 2014)
• "Robots With Attitude: Maybe, Eventually"
  (August 15, 2014)
• "From the Mind of the Lemming: Amateur Night"
  (September 20, 2013)
• "Flying Mechanical Penguins"
  (February 12, 2011)
• "Meet Fenway the Robot, Hospital Helper"
  (September 21, 2010)