Meta Vision Systems has introduced the DLS300 digital laser scanner, a 3D laser vision systems for welding and other applications.
Conventional laser sensors based on the triangulation principle use a laser stripe projected onto the target. This is imaged by a 2D area camera to produce a 3D profile of the target. This use of a laser stripe has certain limitations in practice since the same laser power is used for the whole stripe and the camera images the complete scene. This can lead to problems with dynamic range and reflections.
Meta's new sensor uses triangulation, but with the scanning spot principle. In this method, a laser spot is used instead of a stripe. This solves the two main problems of stripe-based triangulation because it is easy to implement an effective AGC and because imaging is via a linear CCD, which only looks at the region of interest and is not affected by reflections.
Additional benefits of the scanning technology include a programmable field of view and independence of the depth of field of the sensor from the width of field.
