In the pharmaceutical and medical industries, materials are used whose surfaces cannot be detected with a sufficiently high quality for conventional scanning technologies. A close-meshed, regular and comprehensive visual inspection of microplates requires full concentration of high qualified staff and has a high workload.

An automated solution based on a powerful robot, a smart line confocal sensor and a user-friendly operator interface was not available on the market before. For the flatness inspection of microplates the most common method is still tactile measurement on a CMM. Especially for plastic materials this method has a big Impact, since the touch of the probe itself leads to a misrepresented result. Besides that this method is also a user dependent. Optical measurement approaches like laser line triangulation do not work on all surfaces – especially translucent ones. As of yet there has been no solution, that suits the whole variety of microplate materials. With its novel line confocal technology, LMI can provide sensors that can capture the surfaces of very challenging materials in the highest 3D scan data quality.

Especially for materials such as black, white, translucent, the GOCATOR 5516 is the perfect solution. It’s the basis of the OCTUM inspection system, which is integrated into the Pharmabotix 3D Inspect cell. In this use case, measurements are made of flatness, length and width.