Global Sales & Marketing Leader Daniel Otto on the flexibility challenge, the shift from CAD models to AI, and what joining Zebra Technologies means for integrators.

At Automate 2026, one of the industry’s largest automation gatherings with more than 50,000 attendees, Photoneo Global Sales & Marketing Leader Daniel Otto sat down with Jake Hall, “The Manufacturing Millennial,” to talk about where vision-guided robotics is heading. The through-line of the conversation was a single word: flexibility.

Founded in 2013 in a Bratislava garage, where, Otto joked, the very first quality issue was dog hair turning up inside the scanners, Photoneo has grown into a maker of high-end 3D scanners and 3D vision software, and is now part of Zebra Technologies (NASDAQ: ZBRA).

The flexibility challenge

In logistics, no two applications look the same. Every site has different items, boxes, and totes, and traditional, algorithm-based machine vision struggles to keep up with that variety. This is exactly where AI changes the equation. 

Photoneo’s neural network can be trained to recognize hundreds of thousands of different boxes, totes, and items, so a system can reliably find what it is looking for even when the exact part is not known in advance.

From the known to the unknown

For years, robotic picking meant a known part in a known position, which is relatively straightforward to grasp. The hard problems today involve an unknown part in an unknown position. A person can simply be told “pick that up,” but a robot has to see and think. 

Photoneo’s approach moves localization away from CAD-model matching and “golden samples” toward AI trained across roughly 500,000 possibilities, so the system recognizes a box, tote, or item on sight.

One portfolio, every scene

Otto framed deployment as a sequence of questions. First, the scene: is it static, moving, or complex enough that the camera itself has to move on the robot? Photoneo’s portfolio covers all three. Two scanners handle static scenes, while MotionCam-3D, which is the only 3D camera able to scan in motion at speeds up to 40 m/s, means a conveyor belt never has to stop.

Next comes the field of view and resolution. Four scanner sizes span roughly 300 mm to 3.5 m, from small parts up to full pallets. And because materials behave differently, every scanner is available in red-laser and blue-laser variants, which is especially useful for shiny or transparent parts.

Beyond coordinates

“Scanning is the easy part,” Otto noted. “Localization is the most complicated.” Photoneo’s base package, Locator Studio, handles scanning and localization and hands coordinates to the robot. Increasingly, though, customers want more. The Bin Picking module adds path planning and collision avoidance, with the software aware of the entire robot cell and calculating the path it passes directly to the robot controller, so the robot moves exactly the way Photoneo’s software plans it.

A one-stop shop, now with Zebra

For robot and vision integrators, Otto argued, the versatile portfolio is the real draw: a single place to match scanner, laser, field of view, and software to almost any application. He was candid about the flip side, too: “the advantage is we can do everything, and the disadvantage is we can do everything.”

Since joining Zebra Technologies, that portfolio has widened even further. Integrators now get access to Zebra’s 2D machine vision offering, including Aurora Design Assistant, alongside Photoneo’s full 3D range, making Photoneo a genuine 2D-and-3D one-stop shop for flexible automation.

Photoneo, now part of Zebra Technologies, exhibited at Automate 2026 in the South Hall. Watch the full interview.