Abstract
An entirely novel shape measurement method to obtain 3D shapes is proposed, based on a bilateral vibration touch probe that outputs feedback voltage in accordance with its position. A bilateral vibration touch probe, with high-stiffness, is developed. The proposed probe consists of a piezo-electric device and a thin needle, and generates feedback voltage according to the relative distance from the object. The structure of this probe is simple, so that it is able to withstand high rates of acceleration during the measurement process. The shape measurement is performed in an object of unknown shape and the shape of the object can be found by scanning the object surface. Moreover, a nonlinear synchronous multi-axis control algorithm is proposed in order to scan the surface of arbitrary objects and measure their 3D shape. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through experiments. When actual width of 1 mm was measured using the proposed nonlinear synchronous multi-axis control, a minimum error of 21.7 µm was obtained.
