Long-Standoff vs. Short-Standoff Scanners

摘要

Speak with any optics expert about improving the accuracy of today's common 3-D laser scanners and you will be subjected to a barrage of abbreviations and terms such as CCD, CMOS, base angles and diffuse vs. spectral reflectivity, to name a few. When it comes to improving the accuracy of coordinate measuring machine (CMM)-based laser scanners, it is important to avoid putting the cart before the horse. For manufacturers that must hold extremely tight tolerances on their parts, tactile measurement often is their only means of highly accurate measurement. Since the introduction of the first laser scanners in the late 1970s there has not been a huge, chasm-crossing breakthrough in the accuracy of noncontact laser scanners that would allow manufacturers of tightly dimensioned parts to abandon classical touch-trigger and analog scanning methods.