Research of measuring accuracy of laser tracker system

Abstract

This paper presents the achievement of a China NSFC project. The Laser Tracker System (LTS) is a portable 3D large size measuring system. The measuring conditions such as time and temperature can greatly affect the measuring accuracy of LTS. This paper pays a great attention to study how the time and temperature affect the measuring accuracy of LTS. Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) is employed as a high-level measuring instrument to validate LTS. The experiments have been done to find how the time and temperature affect the measuring accuracy of LTS. The experiments show the LTS can work well with the highest measuring accuracy just after three-hour warm-up. However, the LTS becomes unstable and the measuring accuracy decreases after 10 hours. The LTS needs calibration and compensation every 10 hours. The experiments show that the measuring error can be up to 29.6μm when the measuring temperature is 30.5°C even if the measuring error is less than 5.9μm while the temperature is between 20°C and 23.8°C. The research provides a very useful guidance for application of LTS.