A performance evaluation test for laser line scanners on CMMs

This paper presents a performance evaluation test for laser line scanners on 3D coordinate measuring machines (CMMs). Laser line scanners are becoming more popular in recent years, mainly for free form inspection tasks and reverse engineering. Error specification of these scanners is difficult because of many influencing factors like surface quality, surface orientation and scan depth. Therefore, procedures for evaluation and verification of conventional contact probes (e.g. touch-trigger probes) are not appropriate for non-contact laser line scanners. A straightforward test method that uses a planar test artefact is proposed. It enables to identify the influence of in-plane and out-of-plane angle, as well as scan depth on systematic and random errors of the laser scanner. Experimental results show that the tested commercial laser scanner, after calibration, exhibits systematic errors of about 10 μm.