A new sensor for measuring the three-dimensional coordinates and the three-dimensional shape of an object was fabricated. A laser-spotlight was used as the light source. This laser-light is irradiated on a polygon mirror. As the mirror rotates, this light scans the object surface from the lower side to the upper side. The light reflected from the object scans the surface of the sensor developed in this study.
On the sensor surface, 21times;21 phototransistor-elements are arranged two-dimensionally. Out of these phototransistor, only the elements receiving light operate and their output signals are sent to the digital parallel processing circuit.
The role of this circuit is to detect the position (
xs,
ys) of the center element among the phototransistors, activated by the light reflected from the object. These detected values are then passed to a personal computer. By processing the values,
xs and
ys, with the computer program, the three-dimensional coordinates (
X,
Y,
Z) of the center position of the laser-light spot on the object surface are calculated in a real-time fashion.
The time required for the measurement of the (
X,
Y,
Z) is as small as 3.3μs. In addition, even when the surface of the object is illuminated by the background light of the magnitude of 1, 000lx, there is no influence on the measured values (
X,
Y,
Z).
Furthermore, the data of many positions on the object surface are obtained and stored in the memory units of the computer by repeating the above-mentioned operations, the system can offer a display of the three-dimensional shape of the object on the CRT, but, the number of phototransistor elements are fow 21×21 elements. This causes that the maximum error
ΔY (or
ΔZ) in the measured value
Y (or
Z) becomes as large as 3.4mm for the distance of about 320mm between the object and the sensor.
抄録全体を表示