It wasn’t just a startup for Dr. Robert J. Shillman, a lecturer in human visual perception at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when he decided to leave academia to start Cognex, back in 1981. Investing his life’s savings of $100,000 into the company, his ultimate mission was revolutionizing machine vision technology with Cognex. For steering the company, Shillman invited two MIT graduate students Marilyn Matz and Bill Silver offering free bicycles to convince them to leave MIT for a summer. However, what began as a summer job for Bill and Marilyn turned out to be the onset of their entrepreneurial career. Eventually, the three individuals gave Cognex its launch and developed its first vision system, DataMan. It was the world’s first industrial optical character recognition (OCR) system capable of reading, verifying, and assuring the quality of numbers, letters, and symbols marked on parts and components.

As an OEM supplier, Cognex found its first market in the semiconductor and electronics industry. Today, machine vision is a critical element in every step of semiconductor manufacturing, and engineers at Cognex, led by Robert Willett, President and Chief Executive Officer have developed a vast majority of these applications. Since its inception, Cognex has grown as one of the world’s leading providers of vision systems, sensors, software, and industrial barcode readers for manufacturing automation. Cognex Vision solutions enable manufacturers to improve product quality, eliminate production errors, lower manufacturing cost, and exceed consumer expectations for high-quality products. With nearly one million machine vision systems installed, Cognex is clearly a forerunner in this realm. The company’s wide array of solutions are enhancing the manufacturing capabilities of industry leaders across the world including automotive, consumer products, electronics, food and beverages, logistics and other similar industries.

"With nearly one million machine vision systems installed, Cognex has evolved to be one of the most trusted machine vision companies"

Cognex’s vision systems, sensors, and software solution are adding value, inspecting, guiding and identifying, and gauging parts and products while acting as an integral aspect of the automation and handling processes. The Cognex solutions help ensure that every product is made using the right parts and assembled to the correct specification, optimizing quality, minimizing costs and virtually eliminating defects. Because Cognex has the broadest range of vision products, manufacturers can be sure of getting the right solution at the right price every time, no matter what the application is. It seamlessly works with processes ranging from the simplest part orientation verification to the most complicated and final inspection operation using multiple insight vision systems.

With the industry’s best technology and experts, Cognex is focused on helping the manufacturers of today run the smart factories of tomorrow

This unmatched family of solutions and the global network that supports them make more companies choose Cognex than any other machine vision solutions provider in the market.

Enhancing Modern Industries

Machine vision being the heart of the new manufacturing paradigm— Industry 4.0, Cognex offers solutions that align with the changing trends to help manufacturers innovate for the future. From the very first network vision system, Cognex products have been able to communicate with other devices on the line and transmit manufacturing data. Cognex connects links PLCs with the factories’ network devices for data collection across plants and global networks for performance improvement. Sensors guide and communicate with collaborative robots which work safely alongside humans. The company’s machine vision software comes with real-time modeling capabilities that anticipate and accommodate changes and adjust based on incoming data.

Cognex’s advanced machine vision and industrial barcode reader systems deliver instant improvements to any manufacturing process, enabling products to be made at higher speed, without defects. In-Sight 2D machine vision system from Cognex offers unmatched inspection capability and efficient parts identification. The self-contained, industrial-grade vision systems come with a library of advanced vision tools for providing high-speed image acquisition and processing. Some of the solutions including line scan and color systems are explicitly designed to meet every sophisticated price and performance requirements.

When it comes to 3D machine vision solutions, whether performing a single profile measurement or scanning an entire surface in 3D, Cognex has the most powerful and robust 3D machine vision tools. Manufacturers in diverse industries rely on Cognex technology to deliver high accuracy surface feature measurements that go beyond the capabilities of 2D machine vision technology.

Cognex DataMan and MX series of industrial, image-based barcode readers decode 1-D and 2-D codes, from printed labels to the hardest to read direct part mark (DPM) codes and deliver industry-leading read rates. Cognex barcode readers can help reduce costs, increase throughput, and control traceability.

The company’s lists of machine vision offerings are not just limited to hardware; they also offer software solutions for enhanced machine vision capabilities. Cognex’s vision software provides access to the industry’s leading vision tools in a format designed for any development need. All applications benefit from Cognex’s broad-based, industrial-grade toolset. Organizations can also choose between a programmatic or graphical interface to get the industry’s most robust tool library.

Ultimate Flexibility and Robustness

Everyday Cognex's deep learning solutions are at the forefront of helping manufacturers push the limits of machine vision. The solutions, inspired by human cognition, and deep learning technology, provide manufacturing equipment the ability to recognize images and perceive environments with the flexibility of a human brain and speed and robustness of a computer. Deep learning based vision algorithms enable to efficiently solve complicated factory floor applications that are too sophisticated to program or unwieldy to maintain like cosmetic inspection on textured patterns that vary in several ways. Cognex is at the vanguard of this machine vision innovation with the first deep learning based image analysis software— Cognex ViDi—designed specifically for factories. The highly advanced software has the ability to learn directly from a set of images to conceptualize the normal appearance of a part, during the inspection, it applies its logic without programming to read characters, locate, inspect, classify and sort parts even as conditions vary. This helps machines develop solutions to the most sophisticated automation challenges in minutes and make decisions in milliseconds. Capturing over one million images a day, and with the industries’ best technology and vision experts, Cognex continues to lead the way in machine vision and deep learning technology, helping manufacturing become more productive, robust and intelligent.

Simplifying Manufacturing, Boosting Quality

With over three decades of industry presence, Cognex serves an international customer base from offices located throughout the US, Europe and Asia, and via a global network of integration and distribution partners. An instance that portrays the company’s value proposition in the machine vision solutions arena is Bangze Equipment approached Cognex for enhancing their inspection capabilities. Bangze Equipment is a specialist in temperature controllers and protection and uses automated production inspection equipment. The inspection of heat protection short circuits happens at around 300°C, and the short circuit distance only requires around 1mm, humans are unable to carry out these inspections. The In-Sight 1020 vision system from Cognex enabled Bangze Equipment to overcome the challenge. However, as the heater operates at a very high temperature, the camera can only be installed in a very narrow insulated space which Cognex’s In-Sight Micro seamlessly manages. When the equipment is operating, and if the temperature is not high enough for the bi-metal switch to open normally, they can determine the differences between the open and closed statuses using the In-Sight system’s image comparison feature, enabling efficient inspection. Moreover, the In-Sight system communicates conveniently with the Bangze Equipment’s software, breaking down the process in easy to understand terms.

Empowering Future Manufacturing

Cognex has shipped over 900,000 vision-based products, representing over $3.5 billion in cumulative revenue. As experts with the industry’s best technology and experts, Cognex is focused on helping the manufacturers of today run the smart factories of tomorrow. With the people, experience, and knowledge, Cognex ensures that manufacturers get the right machine vision technologies to fulfill their customer requirements.