Book excerpt: To fully appreciate new methods developed in the area of machine vision it is necessary to have facilities which allow experimental verification of such methods. Experimental research is typically a very expensive task in terms of manpower, and consequently it is desirable to adopt standard facilities/methods which allow more efficient experimental investigations. In this volume a range of different experimental environments which facilitate construction and integration of machine vision systems is described. The environments presented cover areas such as robotics, research in individual machine vision methods, system integration, knowledge representation, and distributed computing. The set of environments covered include commercial systems, public domain software and laboratory prototype, showing the diversity of the problem of experimental research in machine vision and providing the reader with an overview of the area.