21st Century Vision

Cognex founder Dr. Bob Shillman with an early Cognex test system.

Today’s Cognex DataMan 100 fixed mount ID reader packs
much more functionality into a much smaller package.

Today’s vision systems have come a long way since the first DataMan system was developed in the early 1980s.  The functionality and user-focused design now available to Cognex customers is the result of more than 25 years of hands-on experience developing new vision technology and solving the industry’s most challenging vision applications.

Today, Cognex retains its focus as a company of “vision experts.”  The company continues to investigate new ways to improve performance of industrial machine vision, while also exploring new markets where vision can provide a competitive advantage, such as transportation (lane departure warning systems) and building security (monitoring secure portals and doorways).

Each of Cognex’s three founders continues to play an important role within the company: Bob Shillman is Cognex’s Chairman and CEO; Marilyn Matz is Senior Vice President of the Vision Software Business Group, and Bill Silver is Senior Vice President and Senior Fellow, pursuing research into new product areas.

All three founders – along with a team of some 800 Cognoids – continue to work hard to maintain the company’s worldwide position as industry leader in machine vision.

Cognex Becomes a Market Leader in Vision Systems!

In 2004, Cognex was invited to open trading at Nasdaq in
celebration of its 15th year as a publicly-traded company.

Cognex’s OEM-focused strategy paid off. In early 1987, the company became profitable for the first time in its history. Cognex went public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1989, at $1.38 per share. Within one year, the stock price had tripled.

Cognex set about growing its business in this period by expanding internationally.

In 1989, Cognex opened its first international office in Munich, Germany.  In 1990, Cognex established a Tokyo-based subsidiary, Cognex KK, to serve the company’s rapidly growing business with large semiconductor and electronics capital equipment makers in Japan.  Today, Cognex has more than 20 offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia to serve its worldwide customer base, and hundreds of distributors around the world that carry Cognex Vision Systems.

In 1995 the company also made the first of many acquisitions when it purchased Acumen, a U.S. based developer of wafer identification equipment for the semiconductor industry. Acquisitions have played an important role in the company’s growth, and enabled Cognex to enter new markets for Vision Systems such as surface inspection, and vehicle vision.

Early Obstacles

Cognex received one of its first patents for Search, a powerful
software tool that dramatically improved machine vision
performance by enabling quick, accurate location of patterns
in gray-scale images. Cognex now has a portfolio of more than
250 patents for advances in machine vision technology.

Despite a growing list of customers using Cognex vision, serious challenges soon became apparent in the company’s business model.  Implementing a vision application in these early years required computer programming knowledge, and users demanded considerable support.

In addition, factory conditions were unpredictable.  Early systems often did not perform reliably outside of development laboratories, where factors like lighting, reflections and shadows could be controlled.   Misperceptions about what vision could realistically achieve combined with poor reliability in factory settings resulted in many vision companies spending too much time supporting customer applications.  As a result, Cognex…and every other company that had entered the vision business… was losing money.

In 1986, Cognex made a major technical breakthrough that helped solve the problem of system reliability.   Cognex co-founder Bill Silver developed a powerful software tool called Search that could locate patterns in gray scale images very quickly and accurately, and succeeded in dramatically improving the results that users could achieve with their vision systems.

At the same time, Cognex launched a new business strategy that helped ensure the company’s survival and subsequent market leadership.

That strategy was to develop and sell standard machine vision hardware and software products to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), who could integrate machine vision into the manufacturing equipment they sold into factories.  These OEMs had engineers on staff with the expertise to program the vision applications, and who then supplied end-users with equipment that had the vision already built in.

This combination of superior technology and new business direction provided the winning recipe that would help Cognex succeed and grow, while the majority of other early vision companies soon failed or got out of the business.

New In-Sight Micro boosts automotive suppliers’ production

New In-Sight Micro boosts automotive suppliers’ production

…. “Using the new Cognex In-Sight Micro vision system with its compact size and high performance, has ensured our customer can build their parts safe in the knowledge that there will be no product defects due to appliqué clipping.”  Visteon, based in Portugal, is using the new In-Sight Micro from Cognex as recommended and installed by Cognex specialist partner integrator Alphr Technology, based in the UK, to optimize the production of automotive control panels.

Wanted – pinpoint precision Visteon is a leading supplier to the top automotive manufacturers in the world. With their business covering a number of key areas including Climate Control, Electronics, Interiors and Lighting, there is no room for error in product delivery. Amongst an impressive product range within their electronics business, Visteon supplies instrument panels for many executive car models across Europe. One vital element of the panel involves the appliqué, a plastic sheet incorporating the speedo and tacho markings. Each appliqué must be clipped into position with pinpoint precision; otherwise the vibration from driving the car could make the appliqué move, resulting in the incorrect speed and revs being shown.

High volume production requires a powerful vision solution
To ensure accurate assembly verification, it was time to bring in a powerful vision system which could not only could cope with Visteon’s high-volume panel production but also fit within the confines of the allocated space.

The partner of choice
Ensuring the most capable and cost-effective vision system would be used; Visteon called upon its trusted vision technology supplier Alphr Technology Ltd. Based in the UK, Alphr Technology has been working with Visteon for a number of years and had previously installed similar lines at their plant in Portugal, as well as other factories across Hungary, Mexico and India. Offering a complete solution, Alphr would design, build, programme and retro-fit the system on-site at their facility in Portugal.

Precision inspection with the In-Sight Micro
Having assessed the project requirements, Alphr selected Cognex’s brand new high-performance In-Sight® Micro to achieve the required inspection rates. Launched earlier this year and measuring just 30mm x 30mm x 60mm, the In-Sight Micro is a unique and powerful vision system, specifically designed to offer outstanding performance as well as fit within confined areas, a common issue in many production facilities.

This new system would also complement two existing Cognex In-Sight 1000 cameras, successfully inspecting pointer alignment for the speedo, tacho, fuel and temperature gauges on each instrument panel.

The production line
To cope with customer demand, two identical production lines were required, running simultaneously in three x 8 hour shifts, 5 days a week, producing 2000 parts per day. Two In-Sight Micro cameras are fitted per production line and are mounted onto a FlexLink frame with LED spot lights mounted alongside the cameras.

Both production lines assemble the PCB with the necessary plastics and LCDs and fully test the parts. Using PatMax®, Cognex’s industry-leading geometric pattern matching technology, the cameras search for two plastic pips positioned at 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock on each appliqué’s white circle. If these pips are obscured, the appliqué is sitting on top of the clip rather than behind it and is therefore not affixed correctly. The power of the PatMax software ensures each feature is located despite any process variation.

Each part is manually loaded onto the rig by an operator and then removed once the inspection is complete. Results are viewed on a PC monitor using a test program written in Visual Basic 6. Failure tickets are printed for the operators and all results are sent to a factory CIM system to monitor performance. Any defective parts are manually removed from the rig, once the operator has pressed the ‘reject acknowledgement’ key.

Success breeds success!
Speed of production has been unaffected despite the new inspection requirement; as the In-Sight Micros inspect each appliqué in a fraction of a second, ensuring production and optimum throughput remains constant. Declan McCabe, Applications Engineer at Alphr Technology was responsible for the electrical design, software development and installation. “Visteon was so impressed with the success of this project; they have requested a quotation for an identical system on another production line.”

Cognex’s Company History

A New Company, and a New Industry

Cognex founders Robert J. Shillman (seated), Marilyn Matz
and Bill Silver in a photo taken for a 2004 Fortune
magazine article entitled, “Heroes of Manufacturing.”

Cognex Corporation was founded in 1981 by Dr. Robert J. Shillman, a lecturer in human visual perception at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Shillman decided to leave academia to start Cognex, investing his life savings of $100,000 into the company. He invited two MIT graduate students – Marilyn Matz and Bill Silver – to embark on this business venture with him, offering free bicycles to convince them to leave MIT for a summer. What began as a summer job for Marilyn and Bill turned out to be the start of a career, as they stayed on to help co-found the company. These three individuals gave Cognex its start – and its name, which was derived from the phrase “Cognition Experts”.

First Vision System

Cognex’s first industrial OCR reader, DataMan.  Cognex
founders celebrated with a champagne toast when the first
DataMan prototype system successfully read its first character.
It took the system 90 seconds to read the number “6”.

The company produced its first vision system, DataMan, in 1982. DataMan was the world’s first industrial optical character recognition (OCR) system capable of reading, verifying, and assuring the quality of letters, numbers, and symbols marked directly on parts and components. Cognex’s first customer was a typewriter manufacturer, who purchased the system to inspect the keys on each typewriter to ensure that they were located in the correct position.

Cognex was one of the earliest companies in a market that was soon crowded with competitors, all intent on securing a position in the new field of machine vision.  In these early years, machine vision generated great excitement as part of the “robot revolution.”  People believed that machine vision would revolutionize not only manufacturing, but even areas as diverse as transportation and household chores.  The reality was not to be as easy…or come as soon….as predicted.