This June saw an impressive density of trade shows taking place even in parallel on different show grounds.
During Automate 2022 in Detroit the first G3* plugfest since October 2019 took place for the machine vision standards GenICam, GigE-Vision und USB3-Vision. A plugfest enables testing any exciting or new device with most worldwide available host-applications for interoperability. As the plugfest attendance is limited to members in the standard working groups and/or programmers from the involved companies, problems may be discussed and sometimes even solved short-term. In Detroit, first public tests and demonstrations of the GenICam GenAPI validation suite based on GigE and USB3-Vision cameras were made, running well with the available cameras.
In the trade show halls, an International MV Standards booth with presence of JIIA from Japan featuring CoaXPress, EMVA from Europe featuring GenICam-GenDC and A3 with GEV-U3V got well attended. Moreover, representatives of the G3 associations did a public machine vision standards update in the speaker forum to promote vision standards in the US automation world.
Automatica in Munich is directed to a similar target audience as Automate in North America and also presented the interaction, usage and extension of machine vision products with and in modern production facilities. In general, machine vision products, machine vision extended to AI products and machine vision enhanced robotic products were well structured and perceptible for the trade show visitors. Herein, G3 association partner VDMA focused on its OPC-UA standard which may serve to bridge GenICam for extended use of GenICam based products in modern production environments. Furthermore, G3 member companies addressed machine vision standards in a presentation forum.
Embedded World taking place in parallel to Automatica this year, has a rather different focus pointing more on software, parts, and tools. Still, machine vision companies were to be found all over the show ground as their products are key components for the industry.
Typically, large semiconductor vendors are well represented at Embedded World. Their imaging focus concentrates on embedded vision which is often still out of the standardization sphere. However, since most of these companies are part of the recently founded cooperation between the EMVA and the Khronos Group on an embedded Vision API this might be changing in future.
* G3 is a group to coordinate the work on international vision standards formed by the associations A3, CMVU, JIIA, EMVA and VDMA (US, China, Japan, Europe and Germany)
