More and more robotic devices are moving outdoors and into other complex operating environments where:

• Color and color-like, information can be valuable for navigation, item identification, etc.
• Items to be identified may be characterized by complex color and/or other attribute distributions.
• Rapid frequent retraining may be required as lighting and other conditions change.

Vision systems that help guide these robots are now called upon to supply robust identification and targeting information that traditional methods cannot possibly provide. Unlike traditional machine vision software that assumes single-colored simple shape objects, WAY‑2C is designed for, and proven in, real-world applications to quickly generate such information from color, multispectral, hyperspectral, and other imaging systems.

A variety of interfaces for communicating between the WAY‑2C software and a robot are available. These range from the widely used XML‑RPC protocol suitable for communicating over the internet and other networks, to custom plugins for high speed communication with specialized devices.

Where the system control is in the robot, WAY‑2C can act as an XML‑RPC server. It can respond to such robot requests as: Capture new image. Find targets of specified class and return their location coordinates, size, etc. Return identity, contrast and/or odds of correct identification information for class in specified region. Return the amount of each class of interest in a specified region, over all regions and/or for all images in a sequence.

In principle, WAY-2C's services can be accessed by almost any robotic device that has the capability to act as an XML‑RPC client. We have recently tested it with the Universal Robots interface . For information on how WAY‑2C could help guide your device contact us.

In other situations, where the system control is in WAY‑2C the latter can send commands to the robot based on its analysis of the scene.

For more information: