In industrial applications where you need to verify or measure the actual shape, position, width, height, or volume of objects it is essential that you have calibrated measurements from your 3D Camera. SICK is now providing tools with a complete frame-work to minimize your effort to get calibrated 3D measurements.
Calibration is a matter of translating what the camera sees in sensor co-ordinates (pixels) to world coordinates in e.g. millimeters or inches. This includes compensating for factors such as lens distortion, perspective view, and the triangulation angle between the camera and the laser. This may sound difficult, but with the new Coordinator tool from SICK, you can have your Ranger-system calibrated and providing 3D coordinates in millimeters to your application within minutes.
Calibration can be performed in numerous ways which often require a calibration target to be positioned very accurately at several known positions or that its movement is very well defined. This can be very expensive and difficult to achieve, especially in an industrial production environment. The calibration method from SICK does not require any of this but is instead done by holding the target by hand at several random positions in the measurement zone!
The Coordinator tool will guide you through the complete calibration procedure and provide immediate feedback about the achieved calibration accuracy. When completed, the result can be stored in the flash memory of the Ranger. By using the latest iCon API, you get calibrated 3D measurements at full speed into your vision application.