Integration of a scanning interferometer into a robotic inspection system for factory deployment

In order to comply with standards and increase product quality, modern high value manufacturing environments have an increasing need for flexible, productionline integrated inspection systems. These systems must not only be capable of covering large, free-form surfaces quickly, but they also need to support multiple sensors and have the ability to automatically identify areas of interest and inspect these locally, with high resolution. To address this issue, we have developed a flexible inspection system, using a laser line scanner, and an interferometer, mounted on an industrial robot arm, providing the ability to follow free-form surfaces following and easy production-line integration. The laser line scanner is used to inspect large areas quickly and with sufficient resolution to identify features of interest through a human observer or detection algorithms. These regions are then automatically revisited and measured in detail using the robot-mounted interferometer. The system integration is performed in a flexible, modular manner to allow easy extension with other sensors, as vision cameras or trackers. In this paper, we present the modular integration strategy, followed by showing key results from deploying this system and highlighting features and challenges resulting from the unconventional integration of an otherwise lab-based interferometer into a robot-mounted shopfloor system.