The out-of-squareness is one of the error sources that affect the positioning accuracy of machine tools and coordinate measuring machines. Laser interferometer is widely used to measure the position and angular errors, and can measure the squareness using an optical square. However, the squareness measurement using the laser interferometer is difficult, as compared to other errors due to complicated optics setup and Abbe’s error occurrence. The effect of out-of squareness mainly appears at the face-diagonal of the movable plane. The diagonal displacements are also affected by the position dependent geometric errors. In this study, the squareness estimation techniques via diagonal displacement measurement using the laser interferometer without an optical square were proposed. For accurate estimation and measurement time reduction, the errors selected from proposed discriminant were measured. Discrepancy between the proposed technique with the laser interferometer (with an optical square) result was 0.6 μrad.
