Morier: “The laser light has a different wavelength. It is more looking into the structure of the material than the normal LED light, which is more surface illumination. It makes [the laser] more sensitive to the roughness of the surface....The LED is more staying on the top of the surface, so it’s very reproducible. On the top of the surface you have peaks, and it’s only counting the peaks.
“If you look at the cloth pads that are made out of a structure of fibers, the laser is so accurate it ... is showing you the nature of the structure. You don’t care about that. You just want to measure a distance ... The laser will really go down into the surface and then, especially at low speed, will behave very differently. This is the reason you have a big difference between low and high speed.”
Laser-illuminated sensors work extremely well on hard pads, but on soft pads with more surface depth, they’re picking up too much useless information, which leads to discrepancies in how they track at different speeds. This is what most people call “acceleration,” but Morier calls it “resolution error versus speed.”
