Evaluate error sources and uncertainty in large scale measurement systems.

Modern manufacturing technologies place increasingly higher demands on industrial measurement systems. Over the last decade there have been rapid developments in 3D measurement systems, with the primary requirement coming from industries such as automotives, aerospace, shipbuilding and power plant equipments for accuracy and efficiency. This paper focusses on the analysis of large scale scanning techniques using a laser scanner; investigating the errors which arise during the measurement process and the uncertainty calculations for the measurements. Both point measurement and surface measurement has been performed and the result shows that the consistency of distance measurements between two points was 65 μm and between two surfaces was 9 μm. The laser scanner requires scans from different positions which have to be aligned. The result shows that reference frame alignment is the best method when compared to the tooling ball best fit method, fitting to 17 μm when using the laser scanner