FARO arm is a contact type of scanner. The strengths of FARO arm are its six degrees of freedom, availability of wide variety of probes, and its portability. If an optical camera can be attached at the end of the arm then the speed of scanning and accuracy of scanned data will increase.
The components, which are large or can not be scanned in one view, are scanned in multiple scans. Then all the scans are registered to complete the component. In SURFACER during the registration, the location of the co-ordinate system becomes irrelevant, since the best fitting algorithm is based on the relative position of the data and not on its absolute position, the idea of having a permanent origin vanishes.
While generating the surface model, trimmed surfaces should be avoided wherever it is possible. Trimmed surfaces are those surfaces whose boundaries are not defined by their parameters but by their boundary trim curves. Since it is not possible to generate transition surfaces in between two trimmed surfaces, so these trimmed surfaces should be replaced. Several methods have been described to check the quality of the surface. Hence surface model should be interrogated to get better surface model. To generate a solid model this surface model should be exported to any solid modelling package e.g. I-deas, ProEngineer etc., where it should be stitched.
The data obtained from contact scanners is not very dense and it has noise also, so if it is directly exported to CAM package for generating the tool path then obtained surface finish after machining will not be very good. To get better surface finish, first of all surfaces should be generated on the digitized data and then this surface model should be exported to CAM software to generate the tool path.
If the data obtained after digitization is dense enough and has a little
noise then it can be directly triangulated. This triangulated data can
be saved as Stereolithography format, which is acceptable, to all the Rapid
Prototyping machines. If the digitized data is not dense then surfaces
should be generated on the point cloud first and then this surface model
should exported to any solid modelling package. On the solid modelling
package this surface model should be stitched properly to convert it into
a solid model. This solid model should be saved in Stereolithography format
and exported to generate Rapid Prototype.
