Performance Evaluation and Compensation Method of Trigger Probes in Measurement Based on the Abbé Principle

Trigger probes are widely used in precision manufacturing industries such as coordinate measuring machines (CMM) and high-end computer numerical control(CNC) machine tools for quality control. Their performance and accuracy often determine the measurement results and the quality of the product manufacturing. However, because there is no accurate measurement of the trigger force in different directions of the probe, and no special measuring device to calibrate the characteristic parameters of the probe in traditional measurement methods, it is impossible to exactly compensate for the measurement error caused by the trigger force of the probe in the measurement process. The accuracy of the measurement of the equipment can be improved by abiding by the Abbé principle. Thus, in order to better evaluate the performance parameters of the probe and realize the accurate compensation for its errors, this paper presents a method which can directly measure the performance parameters of the trigger probe based on the Abbé measurement principle, expounds the measurement principle, the establishment of the mathematical model, and the calibration system, and finishes with an experimental verification and measurement uncertainty analysis. The experimental results show that this method can obtain the exact calibration errors of the performance parameters of the trigger probe intuitively, realize the compensation for the errors of the probe in the measurement process, and effectively improve the measurement accuracy.