Technical session on high precision scanning of large volumes

Wed Feb 27 09:05:52 CET 2019

Last Friday February 15 the company Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence carried out a technical conference, at the facilities of INTA in El Pardo, to check the capacity of its latest technologies for high precision scanning of large volumes.

INTA-SGSN has been collaborating with the Royal Spanish Canoeing Federation (RFEP), for more than 10 years, in the development and optimization of boats for Olympic athletes. Because of this collaboration, the different boats of the Olympic 500 m class K4 are currently being evaluated. On Friday February 15, the company Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence hold a technical conference at the INTA facilities in El Pardo, to verify the capacity of its last technologies for high precision scanning of large volumes.

Calm Water Towing Tank tests try to evaluate the optimal kayak. As complementary information for the analysis, it is necessary to know the geometric characteristics of each model by scanning it with laser technology. INTA-SGSN has laser scanning technology for medium-sized objects up to 3 meters long. As K4 kayaks have a maximum length of 11 meters, it is necessary to use high precision laser scanning technologies for large objects.

Last Friday February 15 the company Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence scanned a competition kayak using a Leica Laser Tracker AT960 in combination with Leica Laser Scanner and Leica Laser Scanner XL scanners. This measurement system allows scanning large volumes with accuracies of tenths of a millimeter. The Leica Laser Tracker AT 960, thanks to its unique "powerlock" tracking system and the built-in camera, continually tracks the position of the handheld scanner, which projects a laser beam onto the surface, picking up a cloud of points. After scanning the piece an STL model is obtained immediately.

After the measurements, the surface generation process (reverse engineering) will be carried out, allowing the naval architecture calculations to analyze the geometry of each kayak.

We trust that our bet for the research applied to sports will help our athletes to achieve greater success for Spanish sport.