Gocator 360º 3D scanning provides measurements of all surfaces on a target object

A prominent feature that designers benefit from with this process is that they don’t need to worry about physically aligning the sensors to get overlapping laser planes. Physical alignment is error-prone and very time-consuming, which is avoided entirely with Gocator’s high accuracy 6 DoF alignment approach.

With the addition of a Surface Align Ring tool users can calculate the transformations for the 4-sensor ring layout with 6 degrees of freedom. The results of this high accuracy alignment are saved in an XML file, and include compensations for X angle rotations. We then load the XML file in a Surface Mesh tool, which stitches the scan data from our 4-sensor ring layout into single mesh, or 360º scan.

Step 2: Scan the pipe, apply aligned transformations, and extract mesh surfaces

Users scan the pipe fitting with the ring layout multi-sensor system and apply the same aligned transformations to the data that was established in the previous step. The result is a 360º Mesh of the pipe fitting, aligned with 6 degrees of freedom.

In order to apply measurements to multiple features on the 360º surface of the pipe (including the radius of the straight section of the fitting and the radius of bottom opening) users apply the Mesh Projection tool to set a plane angle to project our surface data from. The benefit of this tool is that it can extract any number of surfaces from a single 360º Mesh scan. The projected Surface data can then be used as an input for any Surface tool.

Designers also have the ability to apply dedicated Mesh tools directly to raw Mesh data (e.g. for dimensional and deviation measurements), such as the Mesh Plane and Mesh Bounding Box tools.

Step 3: Apply Surface Measurements to the 360º Mesh Projection

Next users will apply measurements to our multiple features of interest. To do this, we apply the Surface Cylinder tool to the top surface of the pipe fitting, using separate instances for each radius we want to measure.

In order to measure the feature on the bottom of the pipe fitting, we add a Surface Circular Edge tool to determine the internal radius of the opening.

To determine the external radius of the opening, we simply duplicate the tool and change the search direction to inward to generate our measurement result. We can add other Surface tools to the projected data in the same way, allowing for advanced measurement on the sides of objects or any other perspective we require.