Automatix Inc., founded in January 1980, was the first company to market industrial robots with built-in machine vision

Machine vision

Machine vision is the process of applying a range of technologies and methods to provide imaging-based automatic inspection, process control and robot guidance in industrial applications. While the scope of MV is broad and a comprehensive definition is difficult to distil, a "generally accepted...

. Its founders were Victor Scheinman

Victor Scheinman

Victor Scheinman is a pioneer in the field of robotics. He is a graduate of the now-defunct New Lincoln High School in New York. In the late 1950s, and while in high school, Scheinman engineered a speech-to-text machine as a science fair project...

, inventor of the Stanford arm; Phillippe Villers, Michael Cronin, and Arnold Reinhold of Computervision

Computervision

Computervision, Inc. was an early pioneer in turnkey Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing . Computervision was founded in 1969 by Marty Allen and Philippe Villers, and headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, USA. Its early products were built on a Data General Nova platform...

; Jake Dias and Dan Nigro of Data General

Data General

Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation. Their first product, the Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer...

; Gordon VanderBrug, of NBS, Donald L. Pieper of General Electric

General Electric

General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...

 and Norman Wittels of Clark University

Clark University

Clark University is a private research university and liberal arts college in Worcester, Massachusetts.Founded in 1887, it is the oldest educational institution founded as an all-graduate university. Clark now also educates undergraduates...

.
Initial product offerings included the Autovision machine vision system, the Robovision welding

Welding

Welding is a fabrication or sculptural process that joins materials, usually metals or thermoplastics, by causing coalescence. This is often done by melting the workpieces and adding a filler material to form a pool of molten material that cools to become a strong joint, with pressure sometimes...

 robot and the Cybervision electronic parts assembly system.