As part of a joint project, members of the VDMA OPC Machine Vision Initiative together with the OPC UA Foundation, have developed a hardware demonstrator that includes the practical implementation of the "OPC UA for Machine Vision (OPC MV) Part 1 Companion Specification.'
"From the point of view of automation technology and factory-IT, this specification represents enormous progress," Dr.-Ing. Peter Waszkewitz, software project manager, Robert Bosch Manufacturing Solutions and member of the core working group. "Image processing systems are among the most complex components in machine building. Their integration is considerably simplified by manufacturer independent uniform methods for control and data administration."
OPC MV Part 1 describes an abstraction of the generic image processing system or a representation of a digital twin of the system. It handles the administration of recipes, configurations and results in a standardized way, while the contents remain manufacturer-specific and are treated as a black box. The demonstrator establishes an infrastructure layer that enables a simplified and uniform integration of all possible image processing systems into higher-level IT production systems (PLC, SCADA, MES, ERP, Cloud). It demonstrates the generalized control of a vision system and abstracts the necessary behavior via the concept of a state machine.
