Optimized visibility in 3D laser scanning

Louise Davis

Vision Components' proprietary ambient light suppression technology enables measurements with laser profilers under up to 100,000 lux. This is an all-new feature for the intelligent VCnano3D-Z laser profilers, enabling them to achieve best-in-class performance. The high ambient light immunity results from a high-intensity laser, combined with extremely short exposure times.

The blue laser has a wavelength of 450 nm and is rated class 2. The new laser scanner series is suitable for a variety of different applications, especially for metallic surfaces. Based on a Xilinx Zynq SoC, the embedded vision systems can be configured for additional tasks on top of generating 3D profiles. Vision Components has programmed the internal FPGA of the SoC module to calculate the 3D point cloud. This leaves the powerful 2 x 866 MHz ARM processor as a freely programmable resource to handle application-specific machine vision tasks.

Vision Components therefore provides the first profilers on the market that can also be programmed to analyze the grayscale image. The product series includes various models for different working distances from about 60 mm to over 3 m, all now available. On request, the manufacturer also implements bespoke sizes. OEMs can therefore get a suitable laser profiler for every need. The laser profilers provide scan rates of up to 2 kHz and resolutions up to about 40 µm on the X axis and 10 µm on the Z axis. They can detect extremely small parts or defects and monitor visual fields that are over 2000 mm wide.