Abstract
Reverse engineering (RE) has emerged as a crucial tool in product design for facilitating reuse of design and relevant knowledge, by which new design can be accelerated. Reconstruction of free-form surface is the main focus of RE. To meet the demand of rapidly and precisely digitizing unknown complex free-form surface, which is the first step of RE, a multi-sensor approach characterized by an integrated use of a contact scanning probe (SP) and a point laser probe (PLP) is proposed. Both of the two digitizers are mounted on the Z axis arm of a coordinate measuring machine (CMM), and the distance between the laser beam of the PLP and the stylus of the SP in feed motion direction is adjusted to be equal to the specified scanning line spacing, so that the PLP is capable of measuring SP’s next scanning path as the SP is performing digitization task. With the priori path information acquired using PLP, measurement path planning algorithms are applied to program the next scanning path for SP real-timely. The planned scanning path can be subsequently used to automatically guide the SP and the CMM for fast and precise digitization of complex surfaces. A prototype system has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed new method through experiment. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach enables rapid, flexible, and high-precision digitization of complex free-form surface in reverse engineering.
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