Automatix

[1][2] Its founders were Victor Scheinman, inventor of the Stanford arm; Phillippe Villers, Michael Cronin, and Arnold Reinhold of Computervision; Jake Dias and Dan Nigro of Data General; Gordon VanderBrug, of NBS, Donald L. Pieper of General Electric and Norman Wittels of Clark University.

[4] Its initial machine vision offering was based on software and hardware licensed from Stanford Research Institute.

Another concept, invented by Mr. Scheinman, was RobotWorld, a system of cooperating small modules suspended from a 2-D linear motor.

[5] Automatix introduced several different machine vision systems during its history: The Automatix AI-32 robot controller used the same processor, bus and RAIL language as the AV II, IV and 5, allowing frame grabber and processing boards to be added for integrated machine vision.

In September 2008, Microscan Systems, Inc., of Renton, Washington, acquired Siemens' Machine Vision business, including Visionscape and Hawkeye.

Automatix robots at the Robots '85 trade show in Detroit, Michigan . Clockwise from lower left: AID 600, AID 900 Seamtracker, Yaskawa Motoman.
Victor Scheinman setting up his RobotWorld system at the Robots '86 show. Small manipulators and camera sensor modules suspended under the top on a 2-D linear motor grid can move freely to perform assembly operations and other manipulations in the space below.
Autovision II machine vision system being demonstrated at the Technology 83 trade show in Israel in 1983. Camera on tripod is pointing down at a light table to produce backlit image shown on screen, which is then subjected to blob extraction .
Three generations of Automatix vision systems, AI 90, AV 5 and AV I
SeamTracker vision-guided arc welding robot under development.