For years, traditional thinking was that CMMs belonged in a lab. While in many cases that’s still necessary, many machines work quickly and accurately on the shop floor, offering multiple measurement applications in environments varying in both cleanliness and temperature. With affordable robotic arms, many shop floor CMMs are even used for automated in-line process checks as well, explains Dylan Coutelle, technical sales engineer for Carl Zeiss Industrial Metrology.
“We’ve seen some of these [CMMs] go in some awful environments, but they perform very well,” Coutelle says.