Automatix Inc., founded in January 1980, was the first company to market industrial robots with built-in machine vision. Its founders were Victor Scheinman, inventor of the Stanford arm; Phillippe Villers, Michael Cronin, and Arnold Reinhold of Computervision; Jake Dias and Dan Nigro of Data General; Gordon VanderBrug, of NBS, Donald L. Pieper of General Electric and Norman Wittels of Clark University. Products Initial product offerings included the Autovision machine vision system, the Robovision welding robot and the Cybervision electronic parts assembly system. Automatix was one of the first users of Motorola 68000 microprocessors, but because almost no software existed for the 68000 in 1980, Automatix had to develop its own operating system and a robotics scripting language, called "RAIL". Its initial machine vision offering was based on software and hardware licensed from Stanford Research Institute. In the late 1980s, Automatix replaced the proprietary 68000 computer in its vision products with an Apple Macintosh II. Automatix mostly used robot mechanisms imported from Hitachi at first and later from Yaskawa and KUKA. It did design and manufacture a Cartesian robot called the AID-600. The 600 was intended for use in precision assembly but was adapted for welding use, particularly Tungsten inert gas welding (TIG), which demands high accuracy and immunity from the intense electromagnetic interference that the TIG process creates. Automatix was the first company to market a vision-guided welding robot called Seamtracker. Structured laser light and monochromatic filters were used to allow an image to be seen in the presence of the welding arc. Another concept, invented by Mr. Scheinman, was RobotWorld, a system of cooperating small modules suspended from a 2-D linear motor. The product line was later sold to Yaskawa. Machine vision systems Automatix introduced several different machine vision systems during its history: Autovision I, 1981, designed for fast time to market, was based on Vision Module technology licensed from Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The AV I used an early Motorola 68000 KDM prototype board interfaced to a Unibus frame grabber board purchased from SRI. The frame grabber was designed for the General Electric TN-2200, an early solid state video camera with a 128 by 128 pixel array and C-mount lens. DECtape II drives were used for program and data storage. Autovision II, 1982, used a custom designed Versabus 68000 processor with a custom 8-channel RS-170 Versabus frame grabber employing an AMD Am2900 bit slice micro-controller, packaged in an