Abstract:
Digital scanning is one way to increase productivity and efficiency of an engineering firm in
dealing with the tight competition in today industrial world. A firm is often challenged to quickly respond the market demands. For instance in Reverse Engineering field one has to make a digital model of an existing physical object. To do this, several commercial 3D digital scanners are available in the market but they cost a fortune. This research focuses on the development of scanner manipulator which is capable of scanning a 3D physical object. Furthermore, the scanned object data is converted into digital form that can be manipulated in a computer. The manipulator has 6 degree of freedom so it can reach a point in Cartesian space from any direction. Development of this arm considers the design and material selections, mechanical components, sensory system and the electronics. Several results show the ability of this arm to scan some physical primitive objects which then be converted into a dedicated computer software for this manipulator. The developed
arm characterizes as a light, accurate, tenacious, and easy to be oriented arm scanner. It has quite large working envelope of about 93 cm spherical radius and of 300x400x500 mm rectangular volume to scan an object.
