Casing project handles mobile measuring
An
Industrial Design Consultancy (IDC) product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Jun 17, 2008
Metris wanted a design which would enhance its Robot CMM Arm while maintaining maximum manoeuvrability with small housings for difficult measurement locations.
Industrial Design Consultancy (IDC) is providing multiaxis manoeuvrability to a robotic co-ordinate measuring machine (CMM).
This latest industrial project required the development of mobility casing solutions for the Metris Robot CMM Arm, a measurement system designed for 3D laser scanning inspections on the production line.
Metris wanted a design which would enhance its Robot CMM Arm while maintaining maximum manoeuvrability with small housings for difficult measurement locations.
IDC had to pack nearly 3500 parts into a housing with a system that provided seven degrees of freedom.
With so many parts moving in different directions, IDC's engineers had to work closely with the Metris design engineers to develop mechanical and casing solutions which were of minimal size.
The main difficulty to overcome when reducing the size and weight was providing sufficient clearance for all the moving parts while avoiding friction problems.
Metris also introduced new safety features that had to be incorporated in the design.
IDC successfully achieved the size and manoeuvrability that Metris was looking for and the resulting RCA is now capable of accessing inner cavity locations of products such as vehicle body shells.
The RCA system itself combines a highly accurate internal seven-axis articulated arm with an external skeleton driven by electric motors.
This process creates a measuring robot that drives a Metris MMD laser scanner along the programmed motion path.
With Metris' encoder technology and stiff carbon fibre axes, RCA provides absolute measurement accuracy within an inspection volume of 4.2m diameter.
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