Digital laser scanner for welding

Meta Vision Systems (Oxfordshire, UK; ) has launched a 3D digital laser scanner for use in automated welding equipment. Designated DLS300, the sensor uses triangulation, but is based on a scanning spot rather than a stripe, solving the two main problems of stripe-based triangulation. First, it is easy to implement effective automatic gain control to compensate for reflectivity changes. Second, imaging is via a linear charge coupled device, which only looks at the region of interest and is not affected by reflections. Additional benefits of the scanning technology include a programmable field of view and independence of the sensor's depth of field from the width of field.