Solitoin launches Digital Smart Camera 'Spot it'

Bangalore, Dec 1: An Indigenously developed digital smart cameras to image products in the Assembly line has been developed by a local technology company, Soliton Technologies and available at half the cost of an imported one.

Currently being tested by eight different manufacturing plants, six of them into auto components segment, these digital camera systems cost Rs.two lakhs on the baseline and have a market potential of around Rs.400 crore, Dr Ganesh Devaraj, CEO of Soliton Technologies told newsmen here at the launch.

To be displayed at the Hannover messe to be held here next week, these cameras called ''spot it'' could spot defects on the assembly line and automatically control an actuator to remove the defective part from the production line.

''An intelligent eye that never blinks, distracts or misses a defect, Spot It is a culmination of three years of R and D efforts by the Soliton Team, Dr Devaraj said.

The company aimed to market Rs.three crore worth of these cameras by December 2008 and was anticipating a triple digit growth. It was also contemplating exports to North American markets. In fact a few systems would be exported to the US, he said.

He said unlike contentional vision systems, Spot-it says goodbyue tio the industry phobic PC and replaces it with a rugged high performance based Digital Signal Processing system. Recently previewed at the Texas Instruments developmers conference, it caught the imagination of delegates.

Dr Devaraj said ''while there is strong demand in Indian Industry for machine vision solutions, there are not enqough qulified machine vision systems integrators around India who can address the requirement''. He said the marketing of spot it was constrained by the shortage of system integrators and hence the company has instituted a comprehensive training programme.

Soliton started in 1998 as a systems integrator of Natioanl Insturments of the US. It had for three years won the worldwide best application of the year Award from natioanl Instruments. The company separated from nationalInstruments in 2005 to become an independent product company.

With a turnover of Rs.five crore, the company is looking forward towards an exponential growth both within the country and abroad through its latest launch. Though the company had been funding its research through internal accruals, it planned to seek venture capital at a later date he added.

UNI