OPC UA
A Standard for Communication Between Machines Conquers Computer Vision
OPC UA - A Unified Communication Protocol for Communication Between Machines
System Components Speak the Same Language with OPC UA
When it comes to Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT ), the core topic is networking and communication between machine elements (machine-to-machine, aka M2M). The OPC UA standard offers a simple way to exchange data and information between machines, independent of platform and manufacturer. In addition to the pure transport of data, OPC UA also defines machine-readable semantic descriptions of the transported information. This makes OPC UA particularly easy to integrate and operate. OPC UA thus offers the best prerequisites for the digitization of industrial environments and is therefore gaining in popularity and importance in industry.
In the area of machine vision, OPC UA also enables simple plug-and-play integration of vision components to flexibly direct them and obtain the required information from them. For example, think of a control station that sets the camera configuration and the complete recipe for image analysis in the vision system and receives notification of the results from the vision system. The integration of a vision component for such a scenario can be easily enabled with OPC UA without any programming effort and without any adaptations of the environment to manufacturer-specific conditions.
Four Questions about OPC UA for the Expert
Our expert Dr. Ralf Lay provides information on some questions related to the importance of OPC UA at Basler.
Vision systems as data suppliers
Among the most important and powerful sensors in an automated factory environment are vision systems with cameras. They already play an extremely important role in modern automation and usually consist of the following components:
