An approach to computer-aided quality control based on 3D coordinate metrology

The quality of manufactured products usually needs to be verified. This paper presents an advanced CAQ approach to compare manufactured objects with reference data from underlying CAD models. First, an overview about the current state-of-the-art in optical 3D measurement techniques is given. After that the research method adopted in this paper is discussed. Furthermore, a software prototype of the presented approach in which a stripe projection system with combined gray-code and phase shifting is described. With this equipment, 3D shapes of objects or manufactured products can be measured. In order to compare the 3D data (represented in sensor coordinate system) a registration to the CAD coordinate system is needed. At first, the selection of a starting point for the orientation parameters is described. For the registration process different numerical algorithms are used to minimize a distance function. To achieve a better performance, an optimization process based on 3D voxel arrays is introduced. After the registration process, several parameters for the kind of geometric displacement can be calculated and visualized. For objects that cannot be measured from one direction, a pair-wise registration as well as a global registration have been developed. Furthermore, some rapid prototyping examples to which our CAQ approach has been applied are presented. Those examples show that our method works well in practice. Finally, some application fields for the CAQ approach presented here are outlined.