Scan the Machine Bed

How this works

Open a bed scan, or start a new one.
Scan the bed from several angles. The shots merge in KUKA BASE.
Clean up: take the floor and anything else that is not bed out of the scan.
Build the grid, then read the heat map and download it.

The camera, its calibration and the bed itself live behind the cog in the header. They are set once per machine, not per scan.

Camera connection

Calibration (camera to flange)

1. Scan the bed

Capture the bed from several angles, overlapping each new angle with the last by about a third. By default the live KUKA flange pose is read at every shot, so the shots merge in robot coordinates. Where the controller cannot be read, switch to manual and type the pose off the pendant for each angle.

Enter pose manually

Or load a point cloud file Choose file…

Millimetres, in KUKA BASE.

2. Clean up the scan

A bed scan catches more than the bed: the floor around the plate, whatever was clamped down, an offcut left in shot. This finds the bed itself — the highest large flat surface — and takes the rest out. Nothing is removed until you apply it, and Undo puts it back.

Keep within (mm of the bed surface)

Wide enough to keep the tapped holes and slots that belong to the bed. Raise it if part of the bed is being cut away.

3. Build the grid

One height per node, placed on exact multiples of the spacing, so a rescan later lines up node for node. Tapped holes and slots are recognised and kept out of the heights.

Coordinates

Node spacing (mm)

Flatness is how far the bed departs from its own best-fit plane — warp, which shimming cannot fix. Level is the raw height including tilt, which it can. The bed model is held back while a map is on screen: it stands in the same place as the measured surface and would bury it.

The two rings on the map mark those spots. Point anywhere on the map to read that node's height, its departure from the plane, and how well it was measured.

Both files are in millimetres, in the coordinates the grid on screen was built in, and both name that frame in the file name. The .xyz file is the bare lattice. The .csv adds how many points went into each height and how much was ignored as hole.