Yamaha’s industrial robots. The private-labeled vision systems will be marketed under the trade name YamaVision, and will be sold through Yamaha Robotics’ North American distributor network. The systems will work with Yamaha’s full range of controllers and robot arms for vision-guided robotic applications.

The agreement is “geared specifically to robot motion control,” says Doug Dalgleish, Yamaha Robotics vice president and general manager. “We’re looking at conveyor tracking, which some our competitors have. We do not have that currently, so that’s an area that we see ourselves getting into very quickly.”

The other DVT agreement involves the Siemens AG Automation and Drives Group, based in Nuremberg, Germany. DVT announced a letter of intent signed with Siemens last December, and “we have since commenced shipping products to Siemens,” says Bob Settle, DVT director of marketing.

Under terms of the global agreement, DVT will provide brand-labeled versions of its Legend family of SmartImage Sensors and FrameWork software to Siemens, and DVT may offer a brand-labeled version of the Siemens VS100 series of vision systems. The DVT units to be provided cover a range of CMOS and CCD-based systems, including gray scale, color, high resolution and high-speed units. They will be marketed under Siemen’s Simatic name. Siemens VS100 family is especially designed for image processing tasks for specific applications such as optical form inspection of small parts.

The private label deal with Siemens took about a year to negotiate, says DVT’s Settle. “One of our major objectives was that we did not want to lose any control of the company,” he notes. DVT is a privately held company founded in 1991.