The light-controlled factory (LCF) is a UK development project running for five years, from July 2013 to July 2018. It is directed by the University of Bath and supported by University College London (UCL) and Loughborough University. This ambitious project aims to demonstrate a “ubiquitous” seven-dimensional (7D) measurement environment across the factory space and integrated with the production and assembly processes. UCL’s contribution to this will be a multi-camera system which can track and align multiple manufactured components across this large manufacturing environment.

Multi-camera systems already have commercial application, for example at lower accuracies as motion-capture systems for entertainment industries, and at metrology accuracies in automotive design applications. The challenge for UCL is to make metrology-level tracking work over wide spaces using systems which, when commercialized, will be affordable. Vision metrology, based on multi-camera, real-time photogrammetry, and ideally using low-cost cameras, is taken here as the starting point. Challenges addressed include optimized camera calibration and the effects of refraction on measurement lines of sight.

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