<title>Optical 3D tube measurement system for quality control in industry</title>

Abstract

Quality control and inspection has become a major tool in industrial production. New measurement systems have to be developed to fulfill these control mechanisms without interfering the production process. Because of the necessity of non interfering systems those have to be contactless. These requirements can be fulfilled by optical measurement systems. The following paper will show an example of such an optical measurement system for measuring spatially bent tubes. There are numerous tasks to measure tubes for shape control in the industrial process. Tubes with different bends, curves and straight parts have to be compared with CAD data. These tubes could be flexible and therefore difficult to measure mechanically. The main problem is to fix the tubes. Another requirement is a short measurement time for shape control in the production line. The new tube measurement system is specially designed for 3D measurement of tubes. The features of the tube measurement system are: non contact measurement, no elastic deformation of the tubes by the fixture, fast acquisition tube geometric, flexible fixing unit, short measurement time by using digital image processing, variable measurement volume and high accuracy.