Robot solutions for automated 3D surface measurement in production

With the increasing complexity of industrial parts, the requirements for 3D optical metrology are increasing in the production environment. Until recently, no high-resolution 3D optical metrology solution was available to measure surface roughness, surface defects and micro geometries on large and high precision parts. Until now, the only solutions for measuring such features on large parts were either portable tactile profilers for roughness measurement or the measurement of replicas. To simplify this type of measurement in production, a high-resolution 3D optical sensor has been mounted on a collaborative six-axis robot. The system allows an easy rough positioning with two-handle bars, fine positioning with integrated joysticks, fully automated measurement and subsequent measurement reporting including ok or not ok status. Typical applications include the measurement of the cutting edge geometry and quality on large tools such as milling cutters with shanks up to 1 m or the automated edge break measurement on large aerospace turbine discs up to 120 kg. In addition to speeding up process series for the measurement of large parts, this solution also opens possibilities of closed loop manufacturing by integrating the robot sensor in an established machining solution. As an example a polishing or finishing cell that sends the measurement results to a machining solution and corrects the part if measurements are out of specification.