All Features
Robb McIvor
CMSC 2012 is now “in the books,” and it was a smashing success at a great venue in New Orleans. Every year, the conference is filled with up-close looks at the latest portable coordinate metrology technologies, unparalleled networking opportunities and social events, and fantastic white paper…
NDI
Northern Digital Inc. (NDI), a provider of optical and electromagnetic measurement systems for medical and industrial applications, has announced that its parent company, Roper Industries Inc., has acquired Ascension Technology Corp., an industry leader in medical electromagnetic tracking.…
Geomagic
Olympic sports keeps pushing athletes to find new and nuanced ways to condition their bodies. The same is true with their equipment. Engineers continually look for new refinements that propel the competition to a new level.
Much of this latter challenge lies in the realm of biomechanics, or…
NIST
A new versatile measurement system devised by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) accurately and quickly measures the electric power output of solar energy devices, capabilities useful to researchers and manufacturers working to develop and make next-generation…
NIST
A new report by a national committee of U.S. industry and university leaders details 16 recommendations “aimed at reinventing manufacturing in a way that ensures U.S. competitiveness, feeds into the nation’s innovation economy, and invigorates the domestic manufacturing base.”
The report was…
Jake Dylik
You won’t hurt RUTH the robot’s feelings if you disagree with her, but it will be difficult to prove your point, given that her opinions are backed by mathematical evidence.
For example, the robotized unit for tactility and haptics (RUTH), which arrived in North America earlier this year, has…
Talion Edwards
Let me start with a confession: I’m an imposter in the metrology community. My background is in the design engineering community—well-meaning folks who don’t quite grasp the complexities of the manufacturing process and the measurement systems that support it.
Measurement people know the…
Sara Ebright
Have you ever walked through a museum and noticed a sculpture that you just wanted to reach out and touch? Of course you didn’t risk it because the first rule of museums is that you can look, but you don’t touch. But your desire to reach for certain pieces may have been exactly the reaction that…
Umberto Tunesi
Those of us who are accustomed to work with standards like ISO/TS 16949 are also accustomed to “hear voices”: the voice of the customer, the voice of the stakeholders, and so on. The only voice we are not accustomed to hear is the voice of quality. Perhaps this should be called the “sounds of…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Imagine smart tools or robotic delivery systems that instantaneously know where they are on an ever-changing shop floor, a system that could automatically orient a CAD model of an object on the shop floor to the local coordinate system without the use of targets or human intervention. Such tools…
NIST
In yet another Olympian feat of measurement, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently calibrated a tape that will be used to measure out the distance of this summer’s Olympic marathon—a distance of 26 miles and 385 yards—to 1 part in 1,000.
Measurement is a…
Blom
In recent years the demand for high-accuracy laser data within the infrastructure sector has increased. The market has discovered the benefits of using both existing off-the-shelf laser data, and ordering new laser data-capture systems suited for high-accuracy planning, building, and maintenance…
Mike Richman
In recent weeks, you have likely heard a lot of chatter about various conventions, conferences, trade shows, and expos. (A rose by any other name....) If you’re sitting there thinking, “Yeah, and you’re one of the chatterboxes,” I’ll respond, “Guilty as charged.” We have frequently discussed trade…
Chuck Pfeffer
Remember when you got your first bicycle? You probably started riding it with training wheels. Soon enough the training wheels came off, and then you eventually went looking for hills and jumps. At some point, as you became better, you took your hands off the handle bars. There was a liberating…
Geomagic
Geomagic, a developer and global provider of 3-D software for capturing, creating, and inspecting digital models of physical objects, has acquired Sensable Technology Inc.’s 3-D design and haptics businesses. Sensable Technology, of Wilmington, Massachusetts, is a leading developer of volumetric…
API Services
This past month API Services and New River Kinematics teamed up for a historic preservation project at St. Luke’s Church and Museum in Smithfield, Virginia. Together, they provided a full building scan and collected point cloud data to keep records for the church and its ongoing restoration.
For…
Four-dimensional computed tomography, or 4-D CT, is the latest development in the realm of industrial X-ray inspection for the nondestructive testing industry. In the simplest of terms, 4-D CT is a 3-D X-ray computed tomography process that captures movement over a period of time.
Like most other…
Steve Geraghty
Although the many logistical aspects of product assembly make the welding stage of manufacturing inherently challenging, assembling products in high-mix environments is particularly demanding, since several different product models are processed every day. Many part numbers and part scenarios…
Bruce McDuffee
Humidity is a tough measurement. It’s very hard to get a repeatable measurement with low uncertainty. This post discusses seven best practices that will help you make a more accurate, repeatable, and reliable humidity measurement. The recommendations are primarily based on the NPL document, “A…
Mike Richman
This has been a fun week for us at Quality Digest, as we’ve had a chance to support World Metrology Week and one of our long-standing partners, the Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS). As many of you know, the CMS is the organization behind the annual Coordinate Metrology Systems Conference (CMSC…
The cold, stark landscape of Antarctica is home to penguins, ice, high winds, and two antennae owned by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that supports and funds all fields of fundamental science and engineering in the United States. The severe conditions of the…
Exact Metrology
Any data captured in the scanning process is not perfect. Data accuracy depends on the accuracy of the scanning equipment as well as the conditions under which the measurements are made. To properly report measured data, the error associated with the measurement should be taken into account…
Belinda Jones
At the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, the highlight of its Egyptian galleries is an elaborate and complete funerary assemblage from the tomb of a 2,300-year-old noblewoman named Meret-it-es. The initial room layout of the Egyptian galleries revealed the space would be…
Belinda Jones
SolarReserve’s first-generation solar power plant is a welcome sign of green progress. Once the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project is completed in 2013, it will generate roughly 480,000 megawatt hours per year of clean, renewable electricity to power 75,000 homes during peak electricity periods.…
Konica Minolta Sensing Americas Inc.
The Frederic Remington Museum is dedicated to displaying, observing, and preserving the works of Frederic Remington. Most famous for his bronze sculptures of cowboys, American Indians, and U.S. Calvary, original Remington pieces are considered prized collector’s items.
The Frederic Remington…