The current trends in manufacturing can be summed up pretty much as they always have been: more for less. In other words, manufacturers always want to be able to do more with less. With manufacturing evolving into a globally competitive marketplace over the last few decades, precision, accuracy, and speed have become essential in order for manufacturers to remain competitive. Optical metrology is quickly becoming the go-to technology in order to achieve competitiveness by delivering more for less.
Once seen as the pariah of measurement systems, optical systems were widely distrusted due to very poorly understood concepts of light refraction, light wavelengths, and more. Even today optical systems are still looked at in some ways as unreliable, even though optical metrology itself is a simple concept and various forms of it have been around for decades (optical comparators are a good example). It wasn’t until recent advancements in optics, computers, and even information processing techniques that companies have finally begun to harness the true power of optical metrology. Fast and powerful computers, high resolution sensors, powerful computer programs, data processing capabilities and more have all led to advancements in using various forms of optical metrology in manufacturing industries such as automotive, medical, semiconductor, aerospace and defense.