Technical Papers & Journals

Modern Radar Metrology

Robert W. Strauten

The advancements in laser tracker technology have allowed portability of measurement solutions from system assembly through field installation and deployment. Accurate characterization of radar angular orientation and centering is paramount in optimizing...

Fast Sphere Recognition in point clouds using RGB or Intensity

Dr. Christopher Andrew Greer, Dr. Jyani Vaddi

Scanning spheres are used for a variety of reasons in large point clouds captured by large volume 3D scanners. A couple these reasons are: point cloud registration, automatic alignment, and creation of geometry and center points for further analysis....

Advanced Quality Assurance Solutions For New Energy Vehicles

David Wick

The manufacture of new energy vehicles (NEVs) is accelerating at a rate not seen in the automobile industry in the last 100 years. Battery and fuel-cell powered vehicles are quieter and have fewer moving parts, yet meeting the same manufacturing quality...

Review of the US Patent Literature on Retroreflectors

David H. Parker

Review of the US Patent Literature on Retroreflectors

David H. Parker

Users of electronic distance measurement (EDM) instruments, such as laser trackers, total stations, and interferometers are familiar with commercially available spherically mounted retroreflectors (SMRs); spherical, or cats eye, retroreflectors; and glass...

Focus variation for fuel cell technology

K. Zangl, R. Danzl, F. Helmli, Kunal Gokhale

Metrology Automated Pipe Cutting Solution

Jennifer Monreal, Keith Churchill,

An Approach towards Layered Process Audit of CMM function for Verification of Aero engine parts

Suneel Kumar, Suchibrata Sen, Sandeep Kumar, Vijaya Lakshmi MR, Ramaraja Bhat, Sreelal Sreedhar

Metrology Automated Pipe Cutting Solution

Jennifer Monreal, Keith Churchill, Sandwith, Scott

The Metrology Automated Pipe Cutting system (APC) automates precise pipe cutting machine alignment to produce accurate miter cuts on spools and piping components faster and easier in the field. The APC development effort involved collaborating with Bechtel...

Integration of Laser Tracker System in BIW Measurement: A Case Study in the Automotive Industry

Volume 16, Issue 1

Armağan Altınışık and Emre Bolova, TOFAS

Product and process quality assurance are challenging tasks due to increasingly narrowing product specifications. Coordinate measurement is one of the key technologies used to inspect and improve the accuracy of produced components. Dimensional inspection tasks are often carried out on conventional coordinate measuring machines (CMMs). However, there are strong concerns about CMM usage due to low measurement capacity, a lack of speed and flexibility, and limited accessibility to points underneath and inside the body of parts under test. To overcome these challenges, manufacturers in the automotive sector must adapt laser scanning technologies. However, according to a limited study of the current literature, scanners are less accurate than CMMs fitted with touch probes. In this article, we summarize a project using uncertainty and measurement system analysis (MSA) to assess body geometry measurement capability with an off-line laser scanning system compared to a touch-probe CMM. The obtained results demonstrated that the uncertainty and gauge repeatability and reproducibility (GRR) values of laser scanning technology are very satisfactory for body geometry measurements. In addition, scanners offer improved measurement capacity due to increased speed and better accessibility to the part vs. CMMs.