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Sick’s Extended Ruler3000 family can focus on the finest details

Sick has expanded its next-generation Ruler3000 family to focus on the speed and precision of its top-flight 3D streaming cameras on the finest details of high-quality, high-resolution 3D inspection and measurement tasks.

With the launch of three compact cameras, as well as an additional mid-range variant, the Ruler3000 cameras now span fields of view between 26.6mm and 1680mm, down to heights of 0.8 micrometers.

Sick says the Ruler3000 sets a new standard by combining the image quality of Sick’s Ranger3 streaming camera with the convenience of a built-in laser, pre-selected optics and factory-calibrated fields of view.

Since its launch two years ago, vision specialists all over the world have taken advantage of the Ruler3000’s unmatched processing speed and ease of integration. Already it has solved challenging 3D applications as diverse as inspecting railway tracks, windmill blades and tire walls, measuring and portioning meat products, and volume dimensioning of legal-for-trade freight.

Sick adds that the Ruler3002, 3004 and 3010 cameras open up the high performance of the Ruler3000 to guaranteed fields of view down to 26.6mm. The addition of a high-powered blue 3R laser gives the three smaller cameras the rapid exposure times necessary to capture the tiniest three-dimensional details at rapid production speeds.

By capturing 3D images, reflectance and scattered light measurements in a single scan at speeds of up to 46KHz, the Ruler3000 cameras can distinguish differing material properties, useful for example in the portioning of meat. The cameras’ light sensitivity and high dynamic range (HDR) also help optimise inspections independent of contrast, or widely differing light remissions, in a single scene.

The three new cameras have been designed with more compact dimensions than the rest of the Ruler3000 family, for integration into tight machine spaces. The Ruler3004, for example, measures 129.5 x 60.3mm x 100 mm (L x W x H). All Ruler3000 cameras are powered by SICK’s highly-sensitive CMOS sensor and innovative ROCC (Rapid On-Chip Calculation) technology. They extract the true 3D shape of an object, regardless of its contrast or colour. They process up to 15.4Gp/s to enable up to 7000 full-frame 3D profiles per second.

Machine integration is made simple by Sick’s user-friendly Stream Setup interface.

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