Draft:Photoneo

Photoneo is a technology company headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia, that develops 3D machine vision, robotic intelligence, and smart automation solutions for industrial applications. The target industries include manufacturing, automotive, logistics, e-commerce, agriculture, medicine, and other sectors.

The company’s main products and solutions are 3D cameras, 3D scanners, bin picking solutions, and AI-powered systems for the automation of industrial processes.

Photoneo is best known for its technology of Parallel Structured Light, which enables high-quality 3D scanning of objects in fast motion. The technology was recognized with the Vision Award 2018, Vision Systems Design Innovators Platinum Award 2019 , IERA Award 2020 , and inVision Top Innovations 2019 and 2021.

History
Photoneo was founded in 2013 by Ján Žižka, Tomáš Kovačovský, and Michal Malý. Their vision was to give sight and intelligence to robots all over the world so that they could see and understand it and thus unburden human workers from tedious and dangerous tasks. The company's establishment is directly connected to the birth of their revolutionary idea of how to capture fast-moving objects in 3D to get high-resolution and high-accuracy image data without motion artifacts. They patented the technology and named it Parallel Structured Light.

The first milestone in the company’s success story came in 2018, when the technology was recognized with one of the most prestigious awards in the field - the Vision Award. Since then, the company has been growing at a rapid pace and extended its portfolio to offer complete and universal intelligent solutions for industrial automation deploying vision-guided robots.

Timeline

 * 2013 - Founding Photoneo s.r.o. in Bratislava, Slovakia


 * 2018 - Photoneo receives the first big recognition for an extraordinary innovation in machine vision - the Parallel Structured Light. The team collects the Vision Award 2018 at the Vision Show in Stuttgart, Germany.


 * 2020 - Official release of MotionCam-3D
 * 2021 - Photoneo receives a funding of 21 Million dollars

Company
Photoneo is a privately held company headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia. It has branch offices in Kentucky, USA, and Shanghai, China, as well as a network of more than 45 distributors worldwide.

Technology
The Parallel Structured Light technology is implemented in the company’s 3D camera MotionCam-3D. The technology enables the capture of the entire surface areas of moving objects in submillimeter resolution and accuracy.

This is possible thanks to a special, proprietary CMOS image sensor with a mosaic pixel pattern. The sensor enables the construction of multiple virtual images within one exposure window, that is, in parallel.

On the occasion of Photoneo winning the Vision Award 2018, Gabriele Jansen, the Managing Director of Vision Ventures and former founding member of the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), said: “The market potential for 3D applications in machine vision is huge. A whole portfolio of different 3D technologies is available for mastering the many different tasks. One technology, however, we have painfully missed so far: the high accuracy snap-shot area scan of large work areas in motion. Now Photoneo has closed the gap and is presenting the market with the Phoxi 3D Camera [previous working title of MotionCam-3D], a unique product to date.”

The Parallel Structured Light technology represents a significant paradigm shift in machine vision as it opens the door to many new applications that were not possible to do before. At the same time, existing applications can become faster and more reliable.

Competitors
According to Robotics Business Review, its main competitors in industrial depth sensing category include Zivid, Ensenso, LMI and Cognex.

MotionCam-3D
MotionCam-3D is an industrial-grade snapshot area-scan 3D camera powered by the Parallel Structure Light technology. The camera can capture objects moving up to 144 km/h (89 mph), providing a point cloud with 900 000 3D points (and 2,000 000 3D points in the static mode), accuracy of 150 to 900 μm, low noise, detailed contours, and completeness of the scan on various materials. The 3D camera is available in five models with different scanning volumes: S, S+, M, M+, L.

PhoXi 3D Scanner
PhoXi 3D Scanner is an industrial-grade 3D scanner that uses structured light projection. The difference between MotionCam-3D and PhoXi 3D Scanner is that like all structured light vision systems, the PhoXi 3D Scanner can be used only for scanning perfectly static scenes. It provides a resolution of 3,000 000 3D points, an accuracy of 25 - 500 μm, detailed edges, and robust scanning performance on various materials. The PhoXi family consists of five models: XS, S, M, L, XL.

Bin Picking Studio
Bin Picking Studio is a versatile, all-in-one solution for bin picking applications. It consists of Photoneo 3D vision hardware and robotic intelligence software that works with CAD models.

AI-powered solutions for automated manipulation of objects

 * Piece picking - picking of mixed types of objects of different shapes, colors, sizes, and materials
 * Universal depalletization - automated unloading of pallets laden with various types of boxes
 * Singulation and sorting - picking of different types of objects and placing them into different locations based on specific criteria