Inspecting verticality of cylindrical workpieces via multi-vision sensors based on structured light

In mechanical manufacturing industry, cylindrical workpiece is one of the most commonly used type of man-made workpieces, and the verticality inspection is a very important task for guaranteeing the quality of the workpieces. In this paper, we proposed a system to inspect the verticality of cylindrical workpieces via multi-vision sensors based on structured light, which has many advantages compared with the traditional methods: fast, on-line, non-contact, flexible and remarkably more accurate. The principles and methods about how to inspect the verticality were given in details, and a real system was set up to carry out the experiments. In the system, a “sensor-unit” which consists of two stripe structured light sensors is used to address the problem of short light stripe. The experiment results indicate a high capability of the proposed system for inspecting large workpieces.