This is a 3D scanner capable to acquire 360° images of solid bodies directly on the production line, without stoppages or mechanical interaction.
Originally developed for the food industry to provide a 3D reconstruction of irregular shapes for automated constant-volume / constant weight food portioning machines, the scanner technology is relevant to many other industrial applications and fits very well the combination of machine vision and robotics needed in flexible manufacturing. ImagingLab has adopted the SAL3D library from AQSense (www.aqsense.com), a sophisticated set of 3D tools that includes laser peak detection, calibration, merge of multiple images, Z-mapping and geometric computations. The developers of the two teams successfully merged the 3D Library, written in C++ within the full application written in LabVIEW (National Instruments).
The scanner makes use of laser triangulation techniques to generate 3D profiles. However, both the 3D library and the application software are compatible with any other 3D imaging devices outputting a COP (Cloud Of Points).