A Digital Twin for Integrated Inspection System in Digital Manufacturing

Abstract

Abstract Coordinate metrology is a crucial part in advanced manufacturing industries to achieve and maintain conformance of high-quality products within design specifications. Meanwhile, software-components are increasingly becoming an essential part of the inspection process because of increasing part complexities in design and the high-volume of data captured from different sensors in hardware-components. This paper presents a virtual replica to work parallel to an integrated inspection system (IIS) for inspection of freeform and complex surfaces based on a metric of their geometric complexity. In this approach, an intelligently guided sampling is virtually conducted from a large dataset, instead of the physical sampling process when the sample points are traditionally selected randomly from the measured surface. Implementation of a closed-loop between the main tasks in IIS is considered in developing this digital twin to reduce the uncertainties associated with the inspection process. A method is introduced to estimate the local densities of the measured points required for virtual sampling from each patch on the work-pieces’s surface based on its geometric complexity. Two case studies are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the methodology. The observed efficiency in selection of the important measured data in the proposed sampling strategy makes it a better sampling strategy to be implemented in a digital twin for IISs.