Texas Section November 2006 Meeting

By Christina Wang

On Nov. 21, 2006, Phill Pittman, FARO Technologies, Inc. in Lake Mary, Florida gave a presentation to Texas Section on “Phase Shift Laser Scanning for the Marine and Offshore Industry”. Classical “time” of flight metrology devices use the simple but potentially very accurate method of timing the time of flight of light projected to and reflected from a specific target. Each measurement must be taken from individual pulses with calculations done in sequence. The advantage of this phase shift laser scanning is that phase shift point acquisition does not time the flight of the beam at all, but rather reads the shift of the “phase” of the light being reflected. Multiple wavelengths are used to resolve the final point placement. Mr. Pittman demonstrated the speed and accuracy of the Phase Shift Laser by scanning the room complete with the attendees in less than two minutes.  Tools have been developed to easily post-process the data collected for use in popular CAD packages.  Mr. Pittman also presented the possible application of this scanning in marine industry such as reverse engineering projects in progress for quality control and CAD comparisons, as-built for alterations to existing vessels or sub-components, modeling of cargo holds for fitting and clearance etc.