Automated part inspection using 3D point clouds

Ever advancing sensor and measurement technologies continually provide new opportunities for knowledge discovery and quality control (QC) strategies for complex manufacturing systems. One such state-of-the-art measurement technology currently being implemented in industry is the 3D laser scanner, which can rapidly provide millions of data points to represent an entire manufactured part's surface. This gives 3D laser scanners a significant advantage over competing technologies that typically provide tens or hundreds of data points. Consequently, data collected from 3D laser scanners have a great potential to be used for inspecting parts for surface and feature abnormalities. The current use of 3D point clouds for part inspection falls into two main categories; 1) Extracting feature parameters, which does not complement the nature of 3D point clouds as it wastes valuable data and 2) An ad-hoc manual process where a visual representation of a point cloud (usually as deviations from nominal) is analyzed, which tends to suffer from slow, inefficient, and inconsistent inspection results. Therefore our paper proposes an approach to automate the latter approach to 3D point cloud inspection. The proposed approach uses a newly developed adaptive generalized likelihood ratio (AGLR) technique to identify the most likely size, shape, and magnitude of a potential fault within the point cloud, which transforms the ad-hoc visual inspection approach to a statistically viable automated inspection solution. In order to aid practitioners in designing and implementing an AGLR-based inspection process, our paper also reports the performance of the AGLR with respect to the probability of detecting specific size and magnitude faults in addition to the probability of a false alarms.