It is a challenge for any optical method to measure objects with a large range of reflectivity variation across the surface. Image saturation results in incorrect intensities in captured fringe pattern images, leading to phase and measurement errors. This paper presents a new adaptive digital fringe projection technique which avoids image saturation and has a high signal to noise ratio (SNR) in the three-dimensional (3-D) shape measurement of objects that has a large range of reflectivity variation across the surface. Compared to previous high dynamic range 3-D scan methods using many exposures and fringe pattern projections, which consumes a lot of time, the proposed technique uses only two preliminary steps of fringe pattern projection and image capture to generate the adapted fringe patterns, by adaptively adjusting the pixel-wise intensity of the projected fringe patterns based on the saturated pixels in the captured images of the surface being measured. For the bright regions due to high surface reflectivity and high illumination by the ambient light and surfaces interreflections, the projected intensity is reduced just to be low enough to avoid image saturation. Simultaneously, the maximum intensity of 255 is used for those dark regions with low surface reflectivity to maintain high SNR. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique can achieve higher 3-D measurement accuracy across a surface with a large range of reflectivity variation.

Piezoelectric-actuator-driven nanopositioning stages, with large stroke and low crosstalk, are quite appealing for fulfilling the through-silicon via lithography etching task. The motivation of this paper is to combine the ability to enable the nanopositioning stage running in a manner of millimeter scale workspace and nanometer scale positioning accuracy. Two pairs of flexure-guided kinematic modules with high displacement amplification ratio are adopted to construct a 4-PP (P is prismatic) XY nanopositioning stage. A new decoupling design is implemented to realize the decoupling behavior between the input actuators and output compliant limbs, respectively. Kinematics modeling including output compliance, input stiffness, displacement amplification ratio modeling, and workspace determination are carried out. After a series of mechanism dimension optimizations via particle swarm optimization algorithm, the performance of the optimized mechanism is analyzed and assessed by using the ANSYS workbench. Then, a repetitive-compensated PID controller and a single-input and single-output closed-loop control strategy are designed. Finally, a series of experimental tests in terms of crosstalk test, frequency characteristic analysis, damping property analysis, dynamic hysteresis nonlinearity characterization, signal trajectory tracking, workspace determination, and Bode diagram plotting are carried out in details. It indicates that the workspace of fabricated prototype has reached to 1.035 mm × 1.035 mm, the crosstalk ratio is kept within 0.5%, and the closed-loop positioning accuracy is determined as 400 nm.

A macro-micro composite precision positioning stage is mainly used in microelectronics manufacturing to achieve high-velocity and high-precision positioning. The residual vibration caused by high-speed macromotion will prolong the settling time and influence the working efficiency. This paper proposes a rapid dynamic positioning (RDP) method to quickly reduce the settling time of a macro-micro positioning stage by employing a designed spring-piezoelectric microstage. The main points of the RDP method are that it can start up the microstage at appropriate moment with proper extension to work against the macromotion vibration. Once the stage vibration amplitude is reduced to the piezoelectric element stroke limit, the micromotion is actuated to approach its final position. In this study, the start-up conditions and extension amount of the piezoelectric element were determined for implementing the RDP method. The feasibility of the method was clarified through theoretical analysis, including dynamic modeling, natural frequency analysis, and a vibration reduction and error compensation analysis. The experimental work was carried out, and the results validated the effectiveness of the RDP method in settling time reduction at different movements. With the assistance of the RDP method, the macro-micro high-speed, large-stroke stage can achieve an effective settling time reduction without sacrificing its accuracy.

Rapid developments and improvements in advanced manufacturing technology mean that the inspection process plays an important role in the quality control of manufactured products. The Geometric Dimension and Tolerance (GD&T) inspection process is used in industries to examine the conformity of manufactured parts with the part specification defined at the design stage. However, as the modern manufacturing trend is towards producing low-volume, high-variety, high-complexity, and large products, current inspection techniques show difficulties in coping with this. This is especially true in automatically inspecting the geometric tolerance items of a manufactured part, such as parallelism and perpendicularity. This paper proposes a non-contact digitization-based automated GD&T inspection system. In this study, we defined a Nominal Inspection Frame (NIF) for a nominal CAD model or a digitized model, in which every GD&T item required may be defined and specified. Using the NIF, an algorithm for automatically extracting the GD&T information on a measured model was developed and implemented in a Reverse Engineering (RE) environment with software. We examine this proposed approach with several applications on dimension tolerance, geometric tolerance, and free-form surface inspection, and discuss the inspection results in the paper.

In the last decade, a significant number of techniques for three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement have been proposed. There are a large number of measurement demands for metallic workpieces with shiny surfaces in industrial applications; however, such shiny surfaces cannot be directly measured using the conventional structured light method. Therefore, various techniques have been investigated to solve this problem over the last few years. Some reviews summarize the different 3D imaging techniques; however, no comprehensive review exists that provides an insight into high-dynamic range (HDR) 3D shape measurement techniques used for shiny surfaces. We present a survey of recent HDR techniques for the digitization of shiny surfaces and classify and discuss the advantages and drawbacks of different techniques with respect to each other.