Laser Tracker opens door to new business areas

Entrepreneurial acting means setting the course for new business opportunities. In industrial companies, the success of such plans stands and falls with identifying the right equipment. That’s why Basque engineering company Ingemat added a Leica Absolute Tracker AT401 to their tools.

Ingemat, located close to Bilbao in the north of Spain, is an automation engineering and robotics company, specialised in the general management of turnkey projects and development of customised solutions for production processes. For their automotive customers, they manufacture complete dies and body-in-white solutions, manufacturing lines, table-top and roller hemming machines and laser-based welding solutions. With the extension of their business activities into the aerospace and wind energy sector, the size of parts the Ingemat team manoeuvres every day increases rapidly – and so do the challenges for the measurement technicians.

Prepared for wind energy dimensions
“A major part of our everyday business is measuring jigs or fixtures for aerospace customers. For these applications, we measure over distances of roughly 7 m”, says Jesús Bahillo, Product Innovation Coordinator for Ingemat. “But since we plan to be more active for customers from the wind energy sector, we expect to work with larger structures in the future. So we need a metrology tool that works even over 45 m.” Ingemat’s weapon of choice for future success is the Leica Absolute Tracker AT401, a very compact portable coordinate measuring system designed for large-volume applications. This instrument emits a laser beam which accurately determines the exact position of a reflector sphere within a typical working volume of 320 m.

Flexible time saver
For Ingemat, the laser tracker from Leica Geosystems opens the door to new businesses. Jesús Bahillo sums up: “Our Leica Absolute Tracker gives us a lot of flexibility. Also, we save a lot of time compared to manual measurement methods. Features like PowerLock or the remote control provide easy handling – for both alignment and measurement, the tracker is fantastic.”