Soliton Technologies, a leader in machine vision products and solutions, would be shortly launching a new product that would bring in automation technology to the printing industry. This would reduce paper wastage while printing by up to 50 per cent as compared to the manual methods being employed at present.
In an interaction with this correspondent, Ganesh Devaraj, Managing Director & CEO, said, the heart of this product was indigenously developed smart camera. It would take pictures of the printed newspapers as they come out of the press at high speeds, detect any errors in the color registration (CMYK) and automatically correct these errors by sending appropriate control signals to the correction motors. Since this correction was done instantaneously and much faster than it was possible to do manually, substantial paper wastage would be eliminated, he said.
Soliton has also introduced a design innovation to substantially reduce the cost of this automation system compared to the imported alternatives. The image processing and control logic would be executed inside the Soliton-designed smart camera itself, eliminating the need for an external control through computers and thereby reducing the cost of the system. The formal launch of this product would happen in August, along with Soliton’s partner who has been given the license to manufacture and market this product, he said.
The company was presently developing more such machine vision technologies for many applications in different industries and will be launching many innovative products in partnership with leading manufactures in the respective industries in the coming months. Dr. Devaraj said Soliton is a pioneer in machine vision in India having been in this field for more than 14 years. Soliton has also received prestigious international awards for its innovative work over the years. Soliton has the unique capability in India to develop end-to-end camera-based products, including the hardware and software, for a wide range of applications and industries. Soliton was presently developing cameras and machine vision products for industrial applications, especially in industries as diverse as automotive and jewellery.
The company has entered in to a multi-year R&D engagement with a leading jewellery manufacturer for developing advanced machine vision-based automation technologies for inspection, sorting, and defect detection in the manufacture of jewellery.
According to Manish Shiralkar, R&D Manager, Soliton’s unique experience in indigenous design and manufacture of industrial cameras and smart cameras, combining both hardware and software, made it ideally suited to develop and supply imaging and image processing products and solutions to meet India’s growing defence and security needs. He said the company was in advanced discussions for the development of miniature smart cameras for use in unmanned areal vehicles among other applications.
