Robotiq, a maker of robotic grippers for industrial robots, has launched a vision-guidance system for pick and place robots. 

The company, which mainly makes 2-finger and 3-finger grippers for Universal Robots, says its camera can be set up in “five minutes and makes vision easy to integrate”.

The new camera component was developed as part of the URCaps, an app store and software and hardware developer program launched by Universal Robots.

Robotiq had made its vision system available to some of its customers, including Continental, known for making car tyres among other things. 

Victor Canton, manufacturing engineer, Continental Automotive Spain, says: “The Robotiq Camera breaks all the integration barriers that we are used to see with vision systems in manufacturing automation. We could think of many pick & place robot tasks that can now be programmed very fast. We will need this solution for upcoming projects with UR [Universal Robots] robots.”

Samuel Bouchard, CEO of Robotiq, says: “We kept seeing projects that would work much better with machine vision, but manufacturers stayed away because of the complexity and cost of existing solutions.

“This is why we have set out to create a camera and vision software that could be set up and used by anyone.”