Adding Laser Scanning Capabilities to the New High Accuracy 6-Axis Romer Absolute Arms
Recently one of our Australian customers had a requirement that needed the most accurate portable arm solution possible. This was easy for us to accomplish and we had no hesitation in recommending the new Romer Absolute 75-Series of portable arms. The 75-Series has the highest level accuracy in the Romer range with a single point repeatability accuracy starting at +/- 16 microns - a remarkable feat of engineering and certainly the current state-of-the-art in portable measurement technology.
The second part of our customer's request was much more demanding and took us around the world to work with our partners to find a solution. Our customer wanted the versatility to be able to laser scan with this high accuracy 6-axis arm. The traditional scanning solution would consist of a new seven-axis Absolute arm from Romer, either a 73 or 75 series arms, with a fully integrated laser scanning head but with a six-axis Arm this hadn't been done before, and as such presented some challenges for the Hi-Tech team.
After a number of discussions around the world with principals and specialist manufacturers one of our new partners at Hi-Tech Metrology, Kreon Technologies of Limoges France, commented that they believe this integration could be done as a joint research and development exercise between the Kreon operation in France and the French manufacturing plant of Romer at Montoire.
After 2-months of development, we are pleased to now announce that this project has been successful and Hi-Tech Metrology were recently delivered the solution to our Melbourne offices for final testing and evaluation. The system consists of a High Accuracy Romer Absolute 6-Axis 7530 Arm with Kreon Solano Lite scanner and Kreon's Polygonia point cloud data collection software and is an excellent piece of French engineering. Now for the first time users have the flexibility that comes with the highest possible accuracy probing arm in the Romer Absolute range - the 75 Series 6-axis and the additional capability provided by a laser scanning head for performing laser scanning inspection and or reverse engineering functions.
Managing Director of Kreon Technologies, Thierry Rebillard, comments ..."we like working with the team from Hi-Tech and when they asked us for some help to develop a solution to integrate one of our new scanners, the Solano Lite, on the new Romer Absolute 6-axis measuring arms of course we were pleased to help. Being a French company and with one of the global Romer manufacturing plants also located in France - this made the process of testing the configuration and the interface systems required so much easier for us." The result is a solution that is well engineered, elegant and very functional comments Riebald.
The engineering team at Hi-Tech Metrology, under the direction of technical manger Paul Mayberry, have been evaluating and assessing the integrated package delivered by Romer and Kreon now for the past two weeks, and Mayberry comments ... "this solution is one of the best that I have seen in my 15-years in the industry. The scanning operation is smooth and easy to use - even for first-time users, with its green directional light from the scanner making it easy for operators to see where the laser line is being pointed to on the object being scanned, and the data capture rates and the quality of the point cloud are first rate."
The Polygonia software, supplied with all of Kreon Technology's scanners, is an easy to use and highly intuitive software package that is an excellent way of capturing dense high-quality point cloud data before post-processing this information into either popular 3D CAD systems, such as Solidworks Premium or alternatively Hi-Tech Metrology's own preferred point cloud engineering package - PolyWorks, from Canadian-developer, InnovMetric.
Our solution from Romer and Kreon represents the current pinnacle of technology available for six-axis arm laser scanning systems, and is another good example of Hi-Tech Metrology's abilities to provide innovative integrated metrology solutions tailored for specific industry needs.