Automatix

Automatix Inc.

Type	Private
Genre	Industrial robots
Founded	January 1980
Founder(s)	Victor Scheinman Phillippe Villers Michael Cronin Arnold Reinhold

Automatix Inc., founded in January 1980, was the first company to market industrial robots with built-in machine vision. Its founders were Victor Scheinman, inventor of the Stanford arm; Phillippe Villers, Michael Cronin, and Arnold Reinhold of Computervision; Jake Dias and Dan Nigro of Data General; Gordon VanderBrug, of NBS and Norman Wittels of Clark University.

Offerings

Automatix Robots at the Robots 1985 show in Detroit, Michigan. Clockwise from lower left: AID 600, AID 900 Seamtracker, Yaskawa Motoman.

Initial product offerings included the Autovision machine vision system, the Robovision welding robot and the Cybervision electronic parts assembly system. Automatix was one of the first users of Motorola 68000 microprocessors, but because almost no software existed for the 68000 in 1980, Automatix had to develop its own operating system and a robotics scripting language, called RAIL. Its initial machine vision offering was based on software licensed from Stanford Research Institute. In the late 1980s, Automatix replaced the proprietary 68000 computer in its vision products with an Apple Macintosh II.

Autovision II machine vision system being demonstrated at a trade show in Israel in 1983. Camera on tripod is pointing down at a light table to produce backlit image shown on screen, which is then subjected to blob extraction.

Automatix mostly used robot mechanisms imported from Hitachi at first and later from Yaskawa and KUKA. It did design and manufacture a Cartesian robot called the AID-600. The 600 was intended for use in precision assembly but was adapted for welding use, particularly Tungsten inert gas welding (TIG), which demands high accuracy and immunity from the intense electromagnetic interference that the TIG process creates. Automatix was the first company to market a vision-guided welding robot called Seamtracker. Structured laser light and monochromatic filters were used to allow an image to be seen in the presence of the welding arc. Another concept, invented by Mr. Scheinman, was RobotWorld, a system of cooperating small modules suspended from a 2-D linear motor. The product line was later sold to Yaskawa.^[1]

SeamTracker under development.

Automatix raised large amounts of venture capital, and went public in 1983, but was not profitable until the early 1990s. In 1994, Automatix merged with another machine vision company, Itran Corp., to form Acuity Imaging, Inc. Acuity was acquired by Robotics Vision Systems Inc. (RVSI) in September 1995. As of 2004, RVSI supported the evolved Automatix machine vision package under the PowerVision brand.

In August 2005 RVSI itself was acquired by Siemens Energy and Automation who by mid-2008 are marketing the RVSI Visionscape and Hawkeye products alongside their own SIMATIC brand, some of which are re-branded DVT/Cognex smart cameras. In September 2008, Microscan, of Renton, Washington, acquired Siemens' Machine Vision business, including Visionscape and Hawkeye.[1] As of January 2009, the Powervision system developed by Automatix was available from RPC Machine Vision Systems, a value added reseller of Microscan.[2]

Notes

References