According to statistics from the AIA, an industry trade group that’s part of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3),
North American sales of machine vision components and systems that provide vision intelligence to robots and other machines reached $2.874 billion in 2018, an increase of 9.2 percent over 2017 and, allegedly, a new record for the market. Application-specific machine vision (ASMV) systems led the growth with $1.998 billion in sales in 2018, an increase of 7.8% over 2017, followed by smart cameras with $466 million, an increase of 14.2%.
Machine vision component markets, also as per AIA stats, set new records in 2018 with $401 million in total sales representing 11.7% growth. This increase was driven primarily by component camera sales, which increased 16.2% to $219 million, followed by software (8.9% to $21 million), optics (8.8% to $44 million), lighting (7.9% to $77 million) and imaging boards (1.5% to $40 million).
Forecasting the Future of Machine Vision
According to AIA's latest survey of industry experts, 80% of respondents believe that sales of machine vision components will remain flat or decrease in the next six months. Similarly, 62% believe machine vision systems markets will plateau or decrease in the next two quarters. Learn more, visit AIA online.