Geometric Error Analysis for Spherical Mounted Retroreflector in Laser Tracker

Mathematical models of the rectangular angle errors and vertex positioning error in spherical mounted retro-reflector (SMR) were firstly presented. The relationship between right angle errors and the angle of incidence beam and reflecting light was given and the vertex misalign error of cube corner retro-reflector had an effect on the compensation radius. A novel method verifying SMR was provided. The verified SMR was inspected by contrast with a standard SMR. Finally, the experiments were carried out both to prove the correctness of the method and to find out discrete degree of point clouds. The experiment result shows that the discrete degree of verified SMR is 0.034mm and higher than that of the standard SMR. The deviation for measuring the same point by the two SMR is 0.021mm and the error in the flatness is 1.2μm. This research work has a certain practical value in high-precision measurement.