Analysis of reproducibility and repeatability of a hand-held laser scanner for gap&flush measurement in car-assembly line

Industry 4.0 has pushed online quality control to be distributed along the production line, therefore, data are acquiring a progressively more important role. The quality of the collected data necessarily depends on the uncertainty of measurement and for this reason, today the main focus is to reduce this uncertainty to the minimum level. In this study the measurement uncertainty of a hand-held non-contact laser scanner (G3F) and the uncertainty associated to the measurement process, i.e. the uncertainty associated to the whole measurement process when the device is operated in the production line by human operators, were evaluated. Data were collected from a Toyota Auris and each measuring point was inspected at least 20 times by three different operators on different parts. This data set has been, at first, processed by a type A uncertainty analysis. Then, a Gage R&R analysis helped investigate reproducibility, repeatability and the system variability.