Metrology

Introducing new variants on existing production lines has lead to a requirement to accurately recreate as-built facilities in a virtual environment. If a line is already in production, access is limited, so it makes sense to carry out as much commissioning as possible offline. This in turn requires the virtual environment to reflect as accurately as possible the real facility.

There have for many years been technologies available to measure with high accuracy the positions of objects in space – particularly laser tracking and laser scanning devices.

We feel it is important to ensure that the virtual and real environments are dimensionally as close as possible, and have developed software and systems to ensure this is achieved in a fast, repeatable, automated way, using different measurement technologies:

Laser Trackers - for alignment of robots and fixtures within a cell

Laser Scanners - for visualisation of the as-built equipment.

Spot lasers - for aligning robot-mounted tools with jigs and fixtures

An article on the challenges presented in aligning virtual equipment to its real-world counterpart can be found here