News in Brief

The following announcements were made at the International Automation Week show, held earlier this month in Detroit, Mich.:

Adept Technology Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), a manufacturer of industrial robots and factory automation equipment, and Silma Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.), a manufacturer of advanced industrial simulation software products, have agreed to merge. Silma will remain in its current headquarters and operate as a division of Adept. The merger will extend Adept's growth beyond the robotics market into motion controls and software for the factory floor. Adept will provide Silma with additional resources and the marketing infrastructure to support Silma's customer base.

Intellution (Norwood, Mass.), a manufacturer of industrial automation software, has signed original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreements with five Japanese hardware and software manufacturers: Yokogawa, Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric, Chiyoda Corp., and NEC. These companies will use Intellution's FIX to improve their batch manufacturing processes.

FANUC Robotics (Auburn Hills, Mich.), a supplier of industrial robots for manufacturing applications, has been selected to provide an automated packaging system for bakery products manufacturer Otis Spunkmeyer Inc. (San Leandro, Calif.). The new system will use a high-speed robot to automatically select and package up to 12 individually wrapped muffins or four "3-packs" at the same time. According to FANUC, the new system will consistently pack 170 muffins per minute.

Acuity Imaging Inc. (Nashua, N.H.), a supplier of machine vision products to end-users in manufacturing applications, has launched the Certified Integrator Program for factory automation systems integrators. The program enables qualifying organizations to provide turnkey machine vision and control systems to a variety of manufacturing end-users through the company's network of distributors. Two levels of integration are supported: technology integrators, which are regional companies that will provide turnkey factory automation, material handling, or other turnkey solutions to manufacturing customers; and market integrators, which are national companies that will provide turnkey solutions to a specific market or application segment.

Rockwell Software Inc. (Milwaukee, Wis.), a supplier of automation software, has signed an agreement with ECT International Inc. (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), a developer of advanced tools for electrical control systems design and documentation. Rockwell will begin marketing ECT's Promise ADS product, which runs as an application in AutoCAD.

Datacube (Danvers, Mass.), a provider of image processing hardware, software and systems, has formed a partnership with Cimetrix (Provo, Utah), a supplier of controller software. Datacube has integrated its MaxVision Toolkit with the Cimetrix Open Development Environment (CODE), a family of open architecture, standards-based software products for rapid application development, application simulation and delivery of the application to the factory floor.

Seiko Instruments USA Inc. (Torrance, Calif.), a supplier of robots for precision manufacturing, has signed an agreement to purchase machine vision systems manufactured by Cognex Corp. (Natick, Mass.). Seiko has used the Cognex products to create Vision Guide, a machine vision option that enables the company's Cartesian Series robots to handle a range of vision-guided robot assembly tasks.

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