User:Matthias-k/sandbox

TEMPORARY PAGE FOR ADEPT TECHNOLOGY, INC. (Work in Progress)

Adept Technology, Inc. is a multinational corporation with headquarters in Livermore, California (San Francisco Bay Area). The company focuses on automation and industrial robots, software and vision guidance. Adept has offices throughout the United States as well as in Dortmund, Germany, Paris, France, and Singapore. Adept is publicly trade on the U.S. NASDAQ under the sticker symbol.



Company History
Adept was founded in 1983, and was formerly the West Coast division of Unimation, part of Westinghouse. However, its roots go back almost 10 years earlier, when company founders Bruce Shimano and Brian Carlisle, both Stanford graduate students, started to work with Victor Scheinman at Standford's AI lab.

Today, the company is active in a variety of industries requiring high speed, precision part handling including food handling, consumer product and electronics, packaging, medical and lab automation, automotive, etc.

Technology
In 1984, the company introduced its first product, the AdeptOne SCARA robot. The simplicity of the mechanism, based on direct-drive motors, made them very robust in continuous industrial automation applications, while maintaining high accuracy.

Around 2004, Adept introduced a table top SCARA robot called the iCobra with the controls and amplifier embedded in the base of the robot. It is claimed to be the fastest robot in its class.

In 2006, Adept released its new parallel picker robot, the Adept Quattro. It is based on a new concept of picker/delta style robot mechanism which has four arms versus the traditional three-arm design. The rotation is achieved through a parallel platform.

Software & Vision
On the software side, Adept continued to develop its powerful robotic language, V+. Even though V+ did not have full capabilities of a general OS, it did offer a variety of tools aimed at manipulating robot arms. For example functions relating to transformation and frames: one can command the robot to move to a position relative to a belt and track it with a single instruction: MOVE pos:%belt

Vision guidance, first introduced with the AdeptOne, was further developed and now contains a powerful object finder, vision inspection, blob finder, etc. enabling vision to robot calibration.

Controls
Adept core business remains to be motion control. Its SmartController CX integrates motion controller, vision guidance and interfaces to factory networks.