What is LADAR?

What is LADAR?

What is LADAR?  As industries around the world work to make their process and products not only automated but autonomous, there has been an explosion in the use of Detection and Ranging systems over the last 20 years. Detection and Ranging systems date back to...
API Metrology Automation Story

API Metrology Automation Story

API Automation Automation is one of our namesakes. And while its easy to focus on the innovative precision measurement equipment that founded our company and revolutionized industrial measurements and machine tool calibration, automation was in that first invention of...
History of Metrology: 5 More Ancient Measurement Tools

History of Metrology: 5 More Ancient Measurement Tools

In previous posts on this blog, we’ve discussed Tools of Metrology that either can be found in your daily life or were ancient measurement tools, and it’s a topic we’d like to return to here. While we often track the refinement in measurement units and tools since...
The Origin of Lasers

The Origin of Lasers

Did you know that discovery of Laser properties was a byproduct of microwave “Maser” research done at Columbia University in 1951 by Charles Towns? In 1953, Charles Townes debuted a device he’d been researching at Columbia University that would stimulate ammonia...
What is Machine Tool Calibration (MTC)

What is Machine Tool Calibration (MTC)

In our “What is Calibration?” article, we discussed how calibration is a two-step process of first evaluating equipment performance against a reference standard and second using that information to improve equipment performance. And we looked at how many of the...
3 Sources of SMR Inaccuracy

3 Sources of SMR Inaccuracy

As we discussed previously on this blog, Spherically Mounted Retroreflectors (SMRs) are made up of three key components: the sphere, the corner-cube reflector, and the reflective coating on the reflector. Each of these components must be manufactured and assembled to...