DragonFly Camera Takes Off at Robots & Vision Show

Chicago, Illinois - June 5, 2001 - Point Grey Research Inc. (PGR) unveils their new DragonFly™ camera at the Robots and Visions Show in Chicago June 5 to 7. DragonFly is an OEM-style IEEE-1394 board level camera designed specifically for industrial machine vision tasks. DragonFly communicates  digitally with the computer through the IEEE-1394 interface to provide maximum control, reliable transmission of images, and software control of camera parameters.

'While FireFly put us on the Firewire digital camera map, DragonFly will ensure that our place is secured with the most demanding machine vision customers,' says PGR Vladimir Tucakov. 'Features such as external trigger, inter-camera synchronization and high resolution sensors are currently not commercially available in any other cameras-especially not at the prices that we offer.'

The DragonFly is network-capable and extremely flexible. Up to 16 cameras can be connected to the same bus using IEEE-1394 hubs, which allows simultaneous image acquisition from each camera to within 10µs-and from several points of view. Multiple DragonFly cameras can also be configured to provide uncompressed streaming video simultaneously. With DragonFly's external trigger feature, users can synchronize image acquisition with outside events.

The DragonFly camera comes as a complete system with an IEEE-1394 interface card, cable and image acquisition software. DragonFly's firmware is easily upgradeable through the IEEE-1394 interface and camera features can also be upgraded in field with PGR's software. Additional feature upgrades under development are extended exposure time and image sub-sampling.

DragonFly software allows control of peripherals such as lighting, actuators, focus, zoom lenses, and camera parameters, such as the CCD integration time and gain. Also under development is software for controlling outputs.

Point Grey Research Inc. is a product engineering and technology company founded in 1997. The company designs and develops computer vision technologies for commercial applications worldwide. Point Grey Research technology has been successfully used in people tracking, object tracking, modeling and dimensioning, mobile robotics, mining and many other computer vision applications.

For further information on Point Grey Research and its products by phone at 604-730-9937.