Abstract: A light-emitting hand-held surface profiler for scanning and profiling the surfaces of objects has a transparent housing, a focusable light source, a conical mirror aligned to redirect light emitted by the light source onto a surface to be profiled, an imaging sensor and a lens aligned to redirect toward the imaging sensor light reflected by the surface onto the lens. The light source, conical mirror, imaging sensor and lens are mounted within the housing and positionally referentially coupled to the housing.

Abstract: A light-emitting hand-held surface profiler for scanning and profiling the surfaces of objects has a transparent housing, a focusable light source, a conical mirror aligned to redirect light emitted by the light source onto a surface to be profiled, an imaging sensor and a lens aligned to redirect toward the imaging sensor light reflected by the surface onto the lens. The light source, conical mirror, imaging sensor and lens are mounted within the housing and positionally referentially coupled to the housing.

Abstract: A method for measuring the range to multiple points on a surface by projecting a line of light onto the surface, imaging said line of light onto a photodetector, computing the centroid of said line of light, computing quality factors for each computed centroid and encoding the quality factors as one or more bits in the centroid value, transmitting said centroid value to a data receiver, and computing the range to the surface for each point corresponding to each centroid value.

Abstract: A large profile, high speed laser micrometer is formed from a light source unit comprised of a plurality of emitter modules that combine to emit a laser sheet and a detector array comprised of a plurality of detector modules. The laser micrometer also includes a data processing unit. Each of the emitter modules is aligned with a corresponding detector module such that an object passing between the light source unit and the detector array can be measured to an accuracy of at least 4/100ths of an inch.

Abstract: A three-dimensional coordinate measuring system which includes first and second towers, first and second viewing devices mounted on the first and second towers, respectively, and a pair of targets mounted on each of the first and second towers a known distance apart. A tilt sensor is mounted on each of the first and second towers to measure the angle of each of the first and second towers with vertical and a host computer is coupled to each of the viewing devices and is programmed to perform photogrammetric algorithms so as to compute the coordinates of unknown points.