World-leading technology leads the way to new embedded high-speed vision applications

Current trends in automation technology require ever smaller, faster and cheaper components and systems that can capture an increasing number of surface properties. In addition to commercial products such as smartphones or tablets, ARM-based architectures are increasingly taking over the industrial market.

The VisionBox LeMans is the first industrial platform worldwide based on the fastest ARMv8 64-bit 8*Cortex-A72 @ 2 GHz multicore server/network processor. It features 8 independent cores each equipped with a NEON accelerator for high speed SIMD image processing. The compact, robust and fan-less platform can be easily integrated into the machine control system via PCIe boards optimised for vision tasks and provides two independent 10 GigE Vision ports for communication with the xposure camera network. The platform was jointly developed by AIT and IMAGO Technologies in Germany.

AIT provides leading edge solutions with the VisionBox LeMans. Next generation vision systems need this performant parallelism to increase processing power as higher clock frequencies got to technological limits. Industrial environments demand embedded processing systems even for parallel architectures. The goal is to operate applications which need high computing power, provide further interfaces apart from the cameras and can deliver these series on a long-term basis. Thus, components such as the processors can be delivered for longer than 10 years, which is more than twice as long compared to other vendors. As it is generally made sure that components for the boards like FPGAs are long-term available, machines and systems can be steadily delivered in series over the long term. In this way, an embedded real-time high-performance image processing system consisting of VisionBox LeMans and the networking enabled high-performance xposure camera, developed at AIT, paves the way to the future.