SpatialAnalyzer® Provides Total Solutions for Portable Metrology
Bob Salerno has been in the metrology industry for the past 20 years, and he’s a problem solver. In his role as a mechanical engineer and co-founder of New River Kinematics (NRK), he gets a lot of calls from clients in the aerospace and shipbuilding industries for problem solving. As the industry innovated rapidly, certain issues bubbled to the surface. “One of the reasons people call with a production crisis is that they are doing something like trying to get a part to fit, and can’t find the reason why it’s not working. Many times it’s transferring data from one measurement environment to another,” Salerno said. SpatialAnalyzer® Provides Total Solutions for Portable Metrology
Bob Salerno has been in the metrology industry for the past 20 years, and he’s a problem solver. In his role as a mechanical engineer and co-founder of New River Kinematics (NRK), he gets a lot of calls from clients in the aerospace and shipbuilding industries for problem solving.
As the industry innovated rapidly, certain issues bubbled to the surface. “One of the reasons people call with a production crisis is that they are doing something like trying to get a part to fit, and can’t find the reason why it’s not working. Many times it’s transferring data from one measurement environment to another,” Salerno said.
Another challenge in the industry is the changing technological environment. “Instrumentation is always changing,” Salerno said. “Ten years ago, laser trackers dominated, but now scanners are more common, and laser radar is finding more use.” It can be a challenge to find solutions for all types of instrumentation.
Each of these instruments brings a different set of strengths and weakness, but the software they use can be universal with SpatialAnalyzer, a software product created by Salerno and his partner Joe Calkins. The SpatialAnalyzer® (SA) software package was designed with these industry shifts in mind. From the beginning, SA was architected from the ground up to be a metrology solution. Salerno and Calkins both have Ph.D.s in mechanical engineering, and that’s why they understand what the user needs and how their instruments are used.
“When measuring a physical property like angle, distance or length, those observations get turned intocoordinates. That’s the real nugget of what we do, turn observations into coordinates,” Salerno said. “We know it’s critical that our users understand the uncertainty associated with every coordinate. Tolerances are getting tighter, more than ever before. Our clients say, ‘We need to know where this edge is, plus or minus 0.004 inches.’ If you want to know that, you need a measurement system that not only provides the edge location, but does so with acceptable uncertainty,” Salerno said.
For engineers in manufacturing, this can mean less rework and less waste. That’s one of NRK’s motivations, as well as being able to create more compatibility in the industry. That means that SA runs on arms, trackers and scanners, and that operators can be cross-trained to work SA on all of them. The data is compatible and so are the operators.
There’s another benefit of cross training that’s overlooked sometimes. “Having an operator know more than one instrument ups their creativity for whole systems. A tracker guy can bring his tracker tricks that he’s known for years to using an arm. He might be able to innovate in a way that someone who was trained only on an arm might not think of it,” Salerno said. Some users have never had instrument-specific software, so they use SA and pick it up right away, and become flexible workers.
And, that is one of many reasons that SA is becoming the industry standard for engineering in large volume projects.
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