light! 004 | The car of the future

current trend to improve the efficiency of laser welding of
metal materials is the development of systems that operate
at short wavelengths (below blue, λ≈0.45μm), where
the absorption of energy in metals is high and cutting precision
is also greater. In Spain, AIMEN and Laser 2000 are
leading the use of such laser welding technologies for the
automotive industry. Along these lines, also remarkable is
defect monitoring and laser welding geometry based on
high speed infrared cameras developed (and validated by
leading companies in the automotive sector, such as Volvo)
by New Infrared Technologies, in collaboration with AIMEN.
Additive manufacturing (or 3D printing) is also one of the
cross-sectional technologies that has had most applications
in the automotive industry, where it has been used
for a long time, especially in prototyping. Although chain
production is not expected to be completely based on 3D
manufacturing in the near future, the use of this technology
is expected to explode in the next few years as a low
cost solution for the design and chain production of small
parts where precision is of the essence. In particular, laser
metal deposition (LMD) is the standard method adopted by
leading companies such as Volkswagen or Nissan, for both
the development of prototypes and for chain production.
In order to accelerate the implementation of this technology,
AIMEN is carrying out the INTEGRADDE project, with
which it intends to create a control system for the parts
produced during the entire process.
Despite all these advances in manufacturing processes
and monitoring the quality of parts, there is always a percentage
of error that may require additional monitoring
during the manufacturing process. In the automotive sector,
a large number of metals are used, which are treated
by different heat processes that give them very particular
properties. For this reason, any deviation from the expected
temperature standards can ruin a whole part. Although
all production processes are usually monitored by artificial
vision, this does not precisely identify the temperature of
the material. Thus, complementary techniques such as thermography
(which analyses the temperature of a material
at different points by remote measurement of the infrared
radiation emitted) are making their way into the industry.
This is where they have focused part of their efforts at bcb,
where they have created a complete thermographic monitoring
ecosystem, bcbMonitor. Alternatively, in many cases
it is necessary to test manufactured parts in situ, which requires
additional portability and flexibility. In the case of the
automobile, it is not always easy to have a 3D measurement
system that shows that parts have been manufactured
without error. For this reason, portable, simple and reliable
solutions are being sought that allow parts to be scanned
in real time, which is what they have done at AsorCad with
their portable 3D scanning laser system.
Away from the assembly line, one of the great revolutions of
the first half of the 21st century, not only in the automotive
field but also in terms of technology and mobility in general,
is expected to be the development of autonomous cars, capable
of navigating without the active participation of the
driver. This means that the cars of the near future must be
equipped with smart vision that makes them capable of detecting
and identifying all the objects that surround them.
This implies the use of different types of sensors and vision
systems, including 3D vision systems, where LiDAR (Light
Detection and Ranging) has positioned itself as the best candidate
to be "the eyes" of the cars of the future. In LiDAR,
a pulsed laser scans the scene and, by measuring the time
it takes for the light pulse to be reflected by the objects in
the scene at different points, the 3D image can be reconstructed.
This technology, combined with object identification
algorithms, provides the possibility of autonomous and
12 light! by secpho