LMI Technologies Acquires AI & IIoT/5G Inspection Company, FringeAI

Combining their skillset to form a new AI Solutions group under the TKH Group, LMI Technologies and FringeAI believe they can answer some of the common issues facing manufacturing companies. Namely, low yield, high operating expenses and the new risk of the pandemic. They think that traditional inspection methods such as rule-based computer vision and manual visual inspection are unable to deliver the precision, scalability, and cost-efficiency required to solve modern quality assurance challenges.

CEO of LMI Technologies, Mark Radford, is excited by the partnership. He said, “The acquisition of FringeAI widens the scope of solutions LMI offers and delivers a customer experience that goes beyond today’s approach of DIY development. Today, developers use AI libraries to train and build deep learning models and integrators to deploy those models with various vision and processing hardware to deliver an inline inspection system. With FringeAI, LMI can combine a highly effective AI software solution to deliver the benefits of AI deep learning to the factory that includes sensor hardware and cloud-based support for the most challenging 2D and 3D inspection tasks.”

LMI believe they can meet these challenges with FringeAI who offer a complete AI/IIoT solution package that includes optimized inspection pipelines using convolutional neural networks for fast and accurate image inspection, low-cost hardware for edge deployment, and cloud services for ongoing tuning and support. FringeAI also delivers a software suite that leverages integrated deep learning, dedicated edge devices, and IIoT/5G connected cloud services.

Chris Aden, the founder of FringeAI, noted the practical applications of AI. He said, “We started FringeAI to solve the most challenging factory inspection applications using AI technology. We quickly realized that cloud-centric AI solutions by themselves wouldn’t meet our customers’ needs. In addition to AI algorithms, we needed new interfaces to vision sensors, robust and portable software for runtime execution, cloud services for data archiving and alerting, and field support to minimize development time and to maximize inspection uptime.”

The acquisition of FringeAI adds AI-driven inspection capability to LMIs’ existing portfolio of 3D sensor hardware, edge accelerators, and web-based inspection software. They feel they now possess a complete, factory-integrated package offering high performance, cost-efficient, AI-based vision inspection for a wide range of applications.

Aden believes that together with the other TKH Group companies, they can “develop and support the world’s best inspection solutions for the most challenging applications.”

You can find more information about the acquisition here. For more from MVPro, click here.