In Gocator® firmware 5.2, the “Surface Section” tool was introduced to give users a new way to extract profiles from 3D surface scans. Profiles can then be measured using all of Gocator®’s built-in profile measurement tools. This new approach to sectioning allows users to orient their 3D surfaces and achieve consistent alignment based on Gocator’s well-established anchoring capabilities. This blog explores these concepts.

What is Surface Sectioning

The Surface Section tool in Gocator® lets you define a cross-section of a surface (i.e., a “section”) from which the tool extracts a profile, to which you can then apply any profile measurement. A section can have any XY orientation on the surface, while its profile is always parallel to the Z-axis (i.e., height value).

Anchoring Advantage

One advantage of the Surface Section tool is that you can anchor it to some other easily-identifiable feature on the scan target (such as the center of a hole or the angle of an edge), which “shifts” the section in relation to that feature. This increases measurement repeatability as a result.

A second advantage is that the Surface Section tool can take any surface as input, such as a combined surface (using the Surface Extend or Stitch tools), a transformed surface (using the Surface Transformation tool), or a filtered/corrected surface (using the Surface Filter or Surface Vibration Correction tools). This capability is significant because it means you can use surface sectioning not only on the initial 3D scan data but also on data output by other tools.

The third benefit of the Surface Section tool is that you can use it to calculate the global X/Y coordinates of a resulting profile, which is required in order to “stitch” multiple scans (from a single sensor or from multiple sensors) into a single 3D point cloud.

2D view

3D view

FactorySmart® Hauptpunkte

Eine erhöhte Messwiederholgenauigkeit ist der Hauptvorteil des Werkzeugs “Oberfläche Sektion”. Bei einer geringfügigen Verschiebung oder Rotation von verschiedenen Objekten in der Fertigungslinie, kann das Werkzeug dies durch einfaches Verankern an einem anderen Merkmal ausgleichen. Dies ermöglicht es Benutzern, Positionsabweichungen leicht zu korrigieren, so dass alle am resultierenden Profil durchgeführten Messungen genauer sind.

Das Werkzeug Oberfläche Sektion ist jetzt als integrierter Messalgorithmus in der Gocator®-Firmware verfügbar. Um mehr über die “smarten” Messwerkzeuge von Gocator® zu erfahren, besuchen Sie die interaktive Firmware Seite unserer Website.

Für allgemeine Informationen zum Thema automatisierte Qualitätskontrolle können Sie den folgenden Artikel zu den Grundlagen der 3D-Bildverarbeitung lesen.