Laser Tracker Placement Optimization for Highly Flexible Manufacturing Systems

In recent years, modular and reconfigurable manufacturing systems have gained attention for their fast adaptability to product changes. While system design is now highly automated, designing the verification setup—used to verify system properties such as stiffness, accuracy, precision, or other quantities requiring measurement of position or positional deviation—remains a manual challenge. This often involves tasks like placing external sensors to measure system performance. This paper argues that design optimization approaches for manufacturing systems can also automate the design of the verification setup. We demonstrate this by optimizing the placement of a laser tracker system with markers within our simulation environment. This task can be complex due to line-of-sight constraints and the simultaneous measurement of multiple systems. We present a straightforward optimization approach to showcase the potential for automation in this area.