MEASUREMENT OF THE SURFACE CONDITION OF A THERMALLY SPRAYED MATERIAL AND ITS THREE-DIMENSIONAL POSITION USING A LASER RANGEFINDER

Abstract

This paper describes that a measurement method for the surface condition of a thermally sprayed object and its three dimensional position with a laser rangefinder. The feature of this rangefinder is to equip an image sensor which has the ability of simultaneously detecting the position of a light and the incident angle onto the sensor. Moreover, the sensor has an autonomous exposure time control function. Therefore, our laser rangefinder can detect the 3D positions of an object with unknown reflectance. We constructed the prototype system and did some experiments to verify the proposed method. The error of the 3D position measurement was Δ z / z =0.7%. As concerns the detection of the surface condition, we could identify three types of surface roughness of a measured object with accuracy. The proposed method has great potential for a wide range of industrial inspections.