Verification And Promotion On The Integrated Vision Unit With Installing On The Edm Machines

IVU is an optical measurement system, integrated by the company AgieCharmilles to visualize and measure work pieces directly on the machine tool, particularly in Electric Discharge Machining (EDM). The entire system from initial design concept to later become the entity has been done by the R&D department of AgieCharmilles in the previous work. The main work of this paper is to verify the accuracy and stability of the system in practical work, and give the advices to promote and enhance the monitoring capacity of the system.CCD sensor and LED light are the main hardware parts of IVU. CCD sensor can move to the top of eroded piece and do the measurements in a short time. According to the video detected by the CCD sensor, the surface condition of work piece can be showed on the screen in order to check the measuring directly from it. Get edge is one of the basic functionalities on IVU.There are four methods to calibrate the IVU system. After the calibration, two experiments were designed to verify it:on one hand, after calibrating, several experiments were organized to test the precision condition and dependency of IVU; on the other hand, In order to make sure the measuring ability of IVU, some alternative measuring systems are used to compare with IVU.Contour scanning is a special functionality designed for customers, which can scan and measure the profile of work piece without knowing before the shape of it. Especially, at the end the results can be seen directly in image and statistic way. This functionality will be very useful in the real manufacturing process. We tested this functionality in two ways:firstly, it was internal check; then, contour scanning was compared with another popular used optical-based instrument. At the end, there was an example of the application experiment. At the end of this paper, we also talked about the next step of this project. In the future, more functions on IVU will be developed, like correcting. With this function, we hope the system can not only visual and measure the work piece, but also help EDM machines to correct the erosion errors.