Category: Education

What is LADAR?  As industries around the world work to make their process and products not only automated but autonomous, there has been an explosion in the use of Detection and Ranging systems over the last 20 years. Detection and Ranging systems date back to RADAR systems that were developed during World War II. RADAR […]

API Automation Automation is one of our namesakes. And while its easy to focus on the innovative precision measurement equipment that founded our company and revolutionized industrial measurements and machine tool calibration, automation was in that first invention of the Laser Tracker as well. Dr. Lau’s inspiration for the first prototype was to find a […]

In previous posts on this blog, we’ve discussed Tools of Metrology that either can be found in your daily life or were ancient measurement tools, and it’s a topic we’d like to return to here. While we often track the refinement in measurement units and tools since Metrology was established in the 18th Century, it’s […]

Did you know that discovery of Laser properties was a byproduct of microwave “Maser” research done at Columbia University in 1951 by Charles Towns? In 1953, Charles Townes debuted a device he’d been researching at Columbia University that would stimulate ammonia molecules to emit microwave radiation. The device was called a Maser, which stood for […]

In our “What is Calibration?” article, we discussed how calibration is a two-step process of first evaluating equipment performance against a reference standard and second using that information to improve equipment performance. And we looked at how many of the “Calibration” services offered for Laser Trackers are actually mislabeled, as they don’t perform the second […]

As we discussed previously on this blog, Spherically Mounted Retroreflectors (SMRs) are made up of three key components: the sphere, the corner-cube reflector, and the reflective coating on the reflector. Each of these components must be manufactured and assembled to extremely precise standards, which is why each one can be a source of SMR error. […]

[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”] [et_pb_row admin_label=”row”] [et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”] Laser Trackers naturally see an erosion in their performance over time. Wear and tear from regular use, plus a host of environmental factors, can create slippage in accuracy. Fortunately, there are many ways to test your Laser Tracker to determine whether it is fit for service. The most […]

What do you think of when you hear the word Metrology? If you pictured industrial environments with lasers being used to measure precise dimensions, you wouldn’t be wrong. But the scope of Metrology is actually much wider than the narrow, manufacturing-based definition we tend to apply to it. Metrology is very simply, the science of […]