Happy Holidays from FARO!

The FARO blog will return on January 5, 2010. Until then, have a great holiday and a safe and happy New Year!

Be sure to view our holiday card at www.faro.com/seasonsgreetings. This electronic card allowed us to take the money saved by not printing cards and donate it right back to our community, making sure that local children had a gift to open this year.

Robotic Drilling using Laser Tracker Technology

It seems that more manufacturing tasks today are being assisted by robots. Whether it’s out of convenience, safety, or cost, there’s no question that the technology keeps improving. But the one missing piece is that these robots are not yet “intelligent”. They need assistance from software and other hardware to make them accurate and repeatable.

Let’s explore an example of metrology hardware used along with robotic technology:

Variation Reduction Solutions, Inc. (VRSI) has been providing customers with state-of-the-art vision solutions for metrology, industrial robot guidance, and contract inspection services since 1998. The VRSI team consists of the most experienced vision, robot guidance, and metrology specialists in the world to provide customers with expert services and unbiased technology evaluations.

VRSI is the prime contractor on two ongoing SBIR programs administered by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and recently completed a third, known as Inlet Duct Robotic Drilling (IDRD). IDRD is now moving to the production stage and involves metrology-guided robotic drilling on key components of military aircraft.

What was the challenge?
IDRD required VRSI and its partners to guide a robotic drilling system that drills and countersinks holes into a military aero structure. The traditional method of drilling these structures required operators to manually crawl into the duct with hand drills and templates. This process was slow, ergonomically challenging, and lacked in-process verification of hole accuracy.

What was the solution?
VRSI and its partners knew they could perform this job more quickly and efficiently using off-the-shelf robots with external guidance, and so they evaluated several technologies and decided on a Laser Tracker. The Laser Tracker is the ultimate solution for VRSI since it is small enough to fit in the duct, yet achieves extremely high accuracy.

How does it work?
The Laser Tracker is used to correct the drilling robot’s position to a radial tolerance of less than two thousandths of an inch. After the drilling sequence is completed, the Laser Tracker is again used to guide a robot mounted inspection device to the proper location to inspect the drilled and countersunk holes. The Laser Tracker’s attributes – size, portability, stability, repeatability, traceability, and accuracy – are benefits that VRSI has seen over traditional methods. Leveraging the efficiency of the latest off-line robot programming methods, the Laser Tracker is used to guide the drilling of over 5,000 holes in the operation.

What was the result?
“A single automated cell replaces several individual, manual cells, and reduces the time to build from weeks to days. We can safely speculate that we are saving millions of dollars over the course of the program with IDRD.” – Don Manfredi, Chief Operating Officer, VRSI

3D Scanning in Forensics

If you’ve ever recently watched an episode of CSI or any other investigation drama on television, you may have seen some interesting technology. No, I’m not talking about infrared scopes or microscopic DNA testing. I’m referring to 3D scanning technology.

In the past few of years more and more crime scenes are being documented by 3D laser scanners. In the field these devices have proven there invaluable worth for the accurate and efficient capturing of data. The older method of using total stations isn’t able to capture as many measurements in the same amount of time as a 3D scanner is able to. Hundreds of thousands of points can be scanned in a matter of minutes compared to only a few points being captured in the same amount of time by a total station. The better quality of evidence usually leads to an increased chance of solving the crime.

Depending on the crime scene will determine what type of 3D laser scanner to use. For example, the FARO Laser Scanner Photon is ideal for environments containing evidence in a 30-120 meter range. The level of detail captured along with the speediness at which it scans provides investigators a virtual photograph in millions of points. Using a forensic software package, technicians can then analyze the scene just as it appeared at the time of the crime.

To read the entire article on 3D Scanning in Forensics, click HERE.

GM to Invest Millions in Michigan Facilities

On Monday, General Motors (GM) said that it will spend $700 million at eight different Michigan facilities with the goal of getting its new rechargeable electric car, the Chevrolet Volt, road-ready. Obviously, this is a technological and economic boost for the state of Michigan and, as we’ve seen, what happens in Michigan affects what happens in other states. A rebounding economy in Michigan can clearly lead to a rebounding economy in nearby states and everywhere else.

These investments by GM will come in the form of new machinery and equipment. GM realizes that improvements in their facilities and processes, in their own infrastructure, will lead to better products and profits. Making a better product – one your customers want, with the quality they expect – is crucial and doing so at a minimum of effort and cost just makes sense. GM is like any other business – one that has struggled or not – they need to make the best possible products and offer the best quality for the best price. Improving their facilities and machinery and getting them up-to-date with the best technology available today is the way to stay, or to become, competitive.

Much of the investments and future plans are efforts to spend more money on products to get them to market faster. A faster design, implementation, and production cycle equals a faster return on investment. This is the model that every successful business must follow and manufacturers are no different. If anything, this model applies to them even more so.

Read the full article in the Chicago Tribune
Watch a recorded webinar on improving manufacturing efficiencies

US Manufacturing Maintains a Global Edge

After one of the toughest years for the manufacturing industry, let alone the US economy as a whole, a recent Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI report predicts that manufacturing production will begin to recover "to 5 percent growth in 2010 and 6 percent growth in 2011." Other analysts, too, are seeing a brighter future for manufacturing in the coming years. In an interview with Dr. Chris Kuehl, Economic Analyst, Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, Manufacturing.net learned that Dr. Kuehl sees certain advantages that the US has over other countries.

Dr. Kuehl says there are "three things that give US manufacturers a bit of an edge even with China in the picture." The first of which being the weak value of the dollar. "With the dollar down at the level it currently is, we're essentially discounting anything we sell internationally. But at some point, that advantage begins to go away." The second factor Dr. Kuehl recognizes is that China, while they hold a large portion of our debt and have fewer regulations posed on their manufacturers, is still relatively rudimentary in their manufacturing culture. "They do have a few sophisticated sectors, but China's specialty is the labor-intensive, mass-production items for WalMart. The US continues to be a more high-value manufacturer." Finally, Dr. Kuehl points out that our single biggest advantage is that US manufacturers are closer to their markets. "Being closer hasn't been a huge issue in the last 10 or 15 years, but if you track what is happening with the energy crisis, it becomes more expensive to bring things from various distant and drawn out supply chains. So you began to see, particularly if oil prices come back up, more incentive to produce closer to the consumer. You now have much more customized, specialized manufacturing and smaller lots."

Dr. Kuehl certainly recognizes the challenges we still face, such as training, hiring and maintaining the export sector, but overall if we play our cards right and focus on the strengths we have that give us the advantage over other countries - we have a chance to turn this around and make the recovery that, for example, MAPI expects.

Read the full interview with Dr. Chris Kuehl
For additional information about MAPI, click here.

Improving Manufacturing Efficiencies Using Portable Metrology

More and more, there is a need to improve manufacturing processes in order to better product quality, lower costs, and increase profitability. Metrology, when both accurate and easy-to-use, is instrumental in the design, manufacturing, and assembly of parts and products. An increasing number of manufacturers require more and more high-precision measurements for their products – each with various complexities, sizes, and shapes. The best possible metrology solution can help guarantee the precision and quality of this ever widening range of products and their production processes.

In the past, traditional measurement tools such as calipers and micrometers were sufficient. That was the best technology available and that was the standard, despite inherent difficulties with complex parts, measurement uncertainty, and a lack of CAD capability. Then fixed coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) came into prominence. The CMM provided very high levels of accuracy, could be automated, and allowed CAD comparisons. But the fixed CMM took away the advantage of portability the older hand tools provided – parts had to be taken to the CMM, to a specialized temperature-controlled room away from the production floor. Not only was this inconvenient, it was costly and inefficient.

As a solution to these problems, portable CMMs were developed. They provide both the flexibility and portability of hand tools and the accuracy and CAD capability of fixed CMMs. There are several types of portable CMMs: articulated measurement arms, laser trackers, and 3D laser scanners. Each provides the benefits of fixed CMMs, but with the added flexibility of being portable. They don’t require a dedicated measurement room, are lightweight, and can easily go to the part that needs measurement. Not only do they perform like a fixed CMM, they are also typically much less expensive.

Unlike their older brothers, portable CMMs can be used throughout the manufacturing process. They can improve quality straight from incoming inspection on through to final inspections before shipping. Portable CMMs are perfect for dimensional inspections and analysis, for machine alignments, for in process and on-machine inspection, first article inspection, CAD-to-part inspections, reverse engineering or rapid prototyping, and even for work in existing measurement rooms.

To remain, or to even become, competitive today, manufacturers need to utilize the best metrology technology available. Time is money and portable metrology can boost efficiency by providing the ability to accomplish jobs with the minimum expenditure of time and effort.

Register to attend a free webinar on how portable CMMs improve efficiency.