Hyperspectral 3D scanning - 3D printer engineering suggestion
Hi everyone, I recently imagined a machine which will perhaps be used one day in various fields of research, and for the moment it's a new invention. I would love to make cash from it and to patent it and everything, except that patents are so 20th century and annoying and confusing, so I am publishing the idea.
Moon and Planetary Rovers are equipped with an infra-red laser that can focus onto a distant rock for example 9 meters away, and a camera measures the color of the light that is reflected by the rock, to see if it is made of silicon, calcium, iron, etc.
It's called a spectrometer. I want to attach a spectrometer to a 3D printer and use it as a 3D scanner. Currently they can capture about 10,000 images per second, "Spectra Per Second(SPS)". With USB3 it's possible to record about 320 SPS to a PC. They vary from hand-held spectrometers to car-sized.
Instead of the hot-end, there would be a drill bit. Next to the drill bit, there would be an IR light, and a sensor that can measure the reflected spectra, and a fan that blows the dust into a mound far away from the IR measurements. The robot would simply dig slices into anything and measure it's chemistry very precisely, i'd hope 0.01mm precision.
What's the use of the robot?
-If you were an archeologist and you wanted to dig up a dinosaur, the robot could automatically dig into the ground and it could detect the sulphur inside the rocks which made up the outside of the dinosaur, and make a map of all the scales and horns of the dinosaur, and perhaps even detect it's colors, the face, and as soon as it detects calcium, it knows it has found a piece of bone, so the robot digs around the bones and saves a lot of time and work to the scientists. Instead of throwing away all the dust from the cave of Denisova, they could have scanned it and graphed the entire chemistry of the cave, and found evidence of footprints, hearths, and if they used it on a Neanderthal burial, they could see what kind of clothes he was buried in and see wooden artifacts, and braids of hair. I think that archeologists should hurry and use this technology.
-If you were a 3D modeller, you could take a very complex shape like a skull or a plant, encase it in soft cement, and set the 3D printer to destroy and measure the skull and return a 3D print of it in submillimeter detail, including the highly complex ridges and grooves that exist in nature, that a 3D scanner would have trouble with.
One of the interesting things about the robot is that it couldn't dig cubic trenches into dig sites with dinosaurs in it, it would have to dig octohedron-lattice landscapes, which would be pretty fun.
