ImagingLab Srl (Lodi, Italy), a company focusing its activity on the integration of machine vision and robotics, has recently extended its products and expertise portfolio, adding a 360° 3D scanner to their offer.

The prototype
Originally developed for the food industry to provide a 3D reconstruction of irregular shapes for automated constant-volume / constant weight food portioning machines, the scanner technology is relevant to many other industrial applications and fits very well the combination of machine vision and robotics needed in flexible manufacturing.
The prototype scanner makes use of laser triangulation techniques to generate 3D profiles. However, both the 3D library and the application software are compatible with any other 3D imaging devices outputting a COP (Cloud Of Points).

The collaboration
ImagingLab has adopted the SAL3D library from Aqsense (Girona, Spain), a sophisticated set of 3D tools that includes laser peak detection, calibration, merge of multiple images, Z-mapping and geometric computations. A very active collaboration between the two companies was started after a meeting in May, in occasion of the 2009 EMVA Conference in Dublin. The developers of the two teams successfully merged the 3D Library, written in C++ within the full application written in LabView (National Instruments). ImagingLab has a very strong preference for this development platform and has also developed a LabView based robotics library compatible with several brands of industrial robots.

Main characteristics of the prototype

• 3 Photonfocus 3D cameras (MV-D1024E-3D01-160-CL)
• 3 Laser line emitters (Z-Laser ZM 18)
• 3 CameraLink frame grabbers (National Instruments NI-PCIe-1427)
• Aqsense Peak Detection Tool (running on the camera FPGA)
• Aqsense SAL3D Metric Calibration Tool
• Aqsense SAL3D Area Computation Tool
• Application software, including image acquisition and machine interface based on the LabView platform (National Instruments)
• Resolution: 1mm (between successive profiles)
• Accuracy: < 1% in volume estimation
• Speed: up to 1 m/s. Typical speed in food processing application is 12 m /min