Editor’s Pick: New Optics, Electronics Speed Portable Scanning

Dear DE Reader:

Even with a portable measuring arm, using a laser scanner for point-cloud inspection, reverse engineering or whatever job the boss has you doing can be a tedious affair. You might have to warm up and calibrate the device. Maybe you wrangle it into tight spots, reference it, connect all sorts of cables and what have you. And then you poke along scanning at less than light speed. Today’s Editor’s Pick of the Week looks at a portable laser scanning system that sounds like it has done away with a lot of that pesky stuff.

Your skinny here is that Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence has a newly engineered laser-scanner for its ROMER Absolute Arm with Integrated Scanner. The ROMER Absolute Arm is an all-purpose portable measuring arm. It comes in six sizes with measurement volumes with diameters between 2.0 m and 4.5 m. You can get optional Feature Packs for functionality like WiFi and battery power.

The new scanner for the ROMER Absolute Arm with Integrated Scanner is the RS4. It’s a turn-on-and-go system. No referencing or warm-up required. It’ll scan regular and complex surfaces as well as problem surfaces like carbon fiber. It has an adaptive laser power feature so that you can scan multicolor surfaces without fuss. It gives you visual, acoustic and haptic feedback. The RS4’s design coupled with the ROMER Absolute Arm’s range of movement should make it easy enough to snake into tight spots and get accurate data.

Still, the neat thing about the RS4 is that it scans more than 60 percent faster than its predecessor. What does that mean? Well, it deploys a wide laser stripe of up to 150 mm, which is about double the size of the earlier model. That means you can capture up to 752,000 points per second. The maximum scanning rate is 100Hz, and accuracy is 0.028 mm. And that means you should be able to get the job done more quickly than you imagine.

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence says that the new RS4 scanner for its portable ROMER Absolute Arm with Integrated Scanner has new optics and electronics that deliver a scan rate approximately 60 percent faster than the previous model. Image courtesy of Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence.

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence is now fitting its new RS4 scanner on the ROMER Absolute Arm with Integrated Scanner. You can get the RS4 model as a retrofit, too.

You can learn more about the RS4 scanner from today’s Editor’s Pick of the Week write-up. Make sure to hit the link at the end and go to the ROMER Absolute Arm with Integrated Scanner web page. Check out the video there. Good stuff.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, DE