Quality and Technology

The fundamental principle for all Metronor operations is continuous improvement – of our products, our processes as well as procedures.

Metronor’s management system is registered to the ISO 9001 standard. The system also meets the ISO 14001 environmental standard and the ISO 11012 measurement systems standard.

Metronor management system audits are carried out by Nemko AS, part of IQNet.

Metronor has been source inspected by several industrial and military customers, and frequently hosts acceptance tests and design verification tests – for industrial but particularly for military systems customers.

All Metronor measurement systems are tested for accuracy using an adaptation of the ISO10360-2 standard, using a traceable length standard. For industrial systems, a performance verification kit is available for traceable verification of system accuracy anywhere, anytime. For military systems, performance verification mechanisms are part of the standard system configuration.

Metronor technology is built on in-house research and development inside electro-optics and photogrammetry – the science of precisely determining the location of items based on images.

All Metronor products have three main components:

• A set of light sources, typically very robust and reliable Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs)
• One or more solid-state digital cameras, capturing images of the LEDs
• A computer, automatically controlling and optimizing the LED and cameras interaction

The LEDs are typically mounted into a structure such as a hand-held probe, and form a stable pattern. If the shape and size of the LED pattern is known, then a single image of the LED pattern is enough to calculate where the LED pattern is relative to the camera – both in terms of position as well as orientation.

Some unique aspects of Metronor technology:

• Completely solid state without moving parts – rugged, reliable, stable/accurate over time.
• Redundancy – designed to acquire more data (minimum 5 LEDs when 3 is minimum requirement) than needed in order to verify measurement accuracy continuously – bad data is worse than no data.
• Modular – easily upgraded, flexible investment, excellent support ability
• Remote, stationary sensor – no forces acting through camera/tripod, so no need to anchor or weigh down to try to eliminate effects of probe movement like on measurement arms.