An optical 3D digitizer for industrial quality control applications

In this work, a device for controlling automatically the quality of sand cores used in the car industry (engine production), is presented. It is based on an optical (contactless) 3D digitizer designed specially for this application. After the analysis of each piece, the digitizer sends the corresponding instructions for the robot to place the discriminated good or faulty cores in a different area. Specific software has been developed for the hardware control and to perform the calculations required. The method described has important advantages of being contactless, fast and highly accurate, with many industrial applications.