The AutomaticMode state machine is entered from state Preoperational of the VisionStateMachineType either by an automatic operation or by the SelectModeAutomatic method.

A call to SelectModeAutomatic causes transition to state Initialized. Alternatively, the system can automatically transition into Initialized.

It is expected that within the states Initialized and Ready, the system can carry out management operations, with recipes and configurations. In order to carry out automatic evaluations, at least one recipe needs to be prepared in the system.

Recipe management is very system- and application-specific and correspondingly hard to generalize. Therefore, systems may exhibit different state transition behavior caused by recipe management methods, according to their capabilities. This is described in detail in Annex B.1 and the definition of the RecipeManagementType in chapter 7.5.

At some point, the system will be in Ready state. The simplest way will typically be a single call to AddRecipe and to PrepareRecipe to load and prepare a single recipe.

It is expected that in state Ready the system can at any time start an evaluation operation. This operation is denoted as a “job”. The “AutomaticMode” state machine defines two distinct methods of carrying out evaluation, namely “single job” operation and “continuous” operation.

Typical examples for SingleJob operation are the inspection of individual work pieces. Typical examples for Continuous operation are web inspection, package sorting, etc. The main differences between these two types of jobs are:

  • With a SingleJob, the client starting the job can reasonably expect it to end after an application-specific, but finite time; a Continuous job will typically not end on its own, so the notion of a timeout is meaningless.
  • Within a SingleJob, typically an AcquisitionDone event will be triggered at some point, informing the environment that all required data has been acquired so that the inspection part can leave the field of view of the camera, either by moving the part or the camera.

The image processing operation is accordingly started by one of two start methods, StartSingleJob or StartContinuous.

In single job as well as in continuous operation, the system can produce an arbitrary number of results, all of them partial with the exception of the last one. Whenever a partial or final result is available, the system shall trigger a ResultReady event with a result ID.

The result can then be retrieved by one of the GetResult method calls or directly from the ResultContent Component of the ResultReady event if it is included in the event Typically, the result will be available through a GetResult method call even if included with the ResultReady event, however the client cannot make assumptions about the result management of the vision system. This has to be treated in an application-specific way.