EC: Cognex DS1100 Series 3D Displacement Sensors

Machine & Embedded Control - Discrete sensors, vision: The DS1100 is an industrial 3D sensor that can determine an object's shape on the production line—its length, height, and width, even its overall volume and topographical information about its surface. This is a Control Engineering 2014 Engineers’ Choice honorable mention.

By Control Engineering October 17, 2013

Unlike traditional 2D machine vision systems, the DS1100 laser profiler provides a topographical representation of parts from which 3D features such as length, width, height, tilt or volume relative to any surface can be measured. In contrast to traditional machine vision systems that provide information in two dimensions from a 2D image that provides only X and Y information, the DS1100, provides a topographical 3D scan that from which extremely accurate X, Y and Z (height information) measurements can be extracted. Before the DS1100, traditional 2-D vision systems required at least two cameras to take 3D measurements on an object: One to provide length and width and the other to give height information. These complex two-camera systems require more space, time consuming integration and calibration and cannot achieve the sub-5 micron-level accuracy that the DS1100 provides. The DS1100 not only achieves inspection results that are simply not possible with most 2D vision tools, but it also requires no onsite calibration and simplifies challenging OCR or presence/absence applications by creating contrast from height changes, independent of color. The DS1100 sensor benefits from full integration with VisionPro machine vision software which includes world-class 3D (Height, volume, plane fitting and tilt tools) as well as 2D vision tools such as PatMax, IDMax and OCRMax algorithms. The housing is IP65 rated and an industrial IP69K rated enclosure option is available for food and beverage applications.

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Cognex Corporation