The tire building process is still dominated by numerous manufacturing stages involving human interaction or supervision. One recurring task is the subsequent application of various material layers on the tire building drum. Currently point-laser triangulation sensors are used to monitor the material overlap, or splice, in usually three locations to detect gross manufacturing faults. The operator is required to visually inspect and if necessary correct problems.

With the transition to more automated tire production, fully automatic monitoring of the tire building process is a requirement. The application of sheet-of-light measurement at multiple stages of the tire building process allows complete 3D acquisition of the entire material layer for all layers, providing data significantly beyond splice measurement alone.

This paper presents a sheet-of-light based tire building measurement system, suitable for fully automatic monitoring of the layer application on the building drum. The operating principle is demonstrated along with data gained on a tire building machine. The various measurement possibilities with the availability of full 3D material data are discussed as well as the advantages and drawbacks associated with the design choices depending on the prerequisites given by existing machinery.