Wireless machine vision systems based on COTS equipment

While wireless is slowly finding his way in industrial automation environments, the real advantages of using WLANs to exchange process data are still unclear. As a matter of fact, at present, solutions characterized by lower bit rates are being mostly considered to this extent. One field which can benefit from the high throughput of WLANs is machine vision: in this case, the need arises to exchange large amounts of information (images) in short times and with reasonable reliability. In this paper, the use of commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) wireless equipment for setting up a machine vision system has been investigated. Sample systems were first deployed and operated. Then, a measurement campaign was carried out in order to characterize the performance one can expect from such kind of systems precisely.