Steel Pipe Measurement System Based on Laser Rangefinder

In order to improve the quality of steel pipes, one of the main requisites is to build pipes that are as close as possible to the designed one. To accomplish this task, an optical distance sensor of reduced size and very low power consumption was developed inside a measurement system allowing reconstruction of steel pipe dimensions. The results obtained led to the construction of a working prototype configured as an active triangulation rangefinder with a gamut of 10 cm starting at 5 cm. The characterization of the novel rangefinder has confirmed the feasibility of this new system with a resolution of ~10 on a range of measurement of 10 cm, providing up to 10 000 measurements per second.