For noncontact surface characterization of manufactured materials.
Coordinate measurement machine (CMM)-based systems are often used for offline and at-line quality inspection. However, CMMs rely on robot arm movement and touch-probe data acquisition, which makes them slow and expensive systems.
As an alternative to CMMs, production engineers have the option of deploying versatile, noncontact optical inspection systems that allow for the implementation of first-article or random part inspection in a fast, nondestructive way and at roughly half the price of a CMM-type or other NIST-certified metrology system.