Automate 2011 shows synergy of shows

I don’t know whether Automate 2011 (held at McCormick Place in Chicago, March 21-24) was a success for every exhibitor and attendee, but it had all the necessary elements. Unofficial numbers for the show were 170 exhibitors and over 7500 attendees.

The floor traffic, which waxed and waned during the four days of the show, seemed to consist of many system integrators, tool manufacturers, and warehouse system providers—ideal traffic for the show and attributable to the very large, co-located ProMat show on materials handling. Indeed, walking around ProMat was a bit like walking through a display of machine vision in action.

Having recently completed a market report on the use of vision in service robots in, among other applications, warehousing, it was great to see the robots at Kiva Systems gliding eerily around the floor, using embedded smart camera technology to read Data Matrix codes on the floor and to position themselves below shelves that they then picked up and moved to a human who would pick out desired parts.

In additional good news for the machine vision industry, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) presented the preliminary results of its annual statistics for industrial robots, including vision-guided robots. In 2010, with more than 115,000 industrial robots shipped, the number of units sold worldwide almost doubled from 2009, the lowest year since the early 1990s.

Here are some slides from the IFR presentation, which show trends from 2001 to 2011, and the strength of markets in Asia, especially in Korea. An article on the subject explores the trends in different regions and industries (click on images to enlarge).