Automated Solving Algorithm and Application for Oriented Bounding Box Based on Principal Axis of Inertia

Xiao-Bo Jin ,Lei Pei ,Zhang Le ,Wenguo Zhang

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2101/1/012007

Abstract

In mechanical design and manufacture, the minimum size of raw material of each part should be measured before processing. Generally, this size could be equal to the size of minimum bounding box. When the assembled parts of a product reach an enormous quantity, the measurement would be a rough work. This paper introduced an automated solving algorithm for the oriented bounding box based on principal axis of inertia, combined with CATIA structural tree recursive traversal algorithm according to CAA V5 Automation API, to implement an automated solution of the engineering acceptable minimum oriented bounding box of CATIA model.

Highlights

Bounding box is an algorithm for obtaining an optimal bounding space of a discrete point set, its basic idea is to use larger but simple geometry such as sphere and cuboid to approximate an object having complex geometry
This paper introduced an automated solving algorithm for the oriented bounding box based on principal axis of inertia, combined with CATIA structural tree recursive traversal algorithm according to CAA V5 Automation API, to implement an automated solution of the engineering acceptable minimum oriented bounding box of CATIA model
oriented bounding box (OBB) was a bounding box with higher accuracy to approximate an object compared with the bounding sphere and the aligned-axis bounding box (AABB), it could be rotated arbitrarily according to the first moment of the object, and the OBB with an appropriate direction matrix could be deemed as the optimal minimum bounding box for a geometric object

Summary

Introduction

Bounding box is an algorithm for obtaining an optimal bounding space of a discrete point set, its basic idea is to use larger but simple geometry such as sphere and cuboid to approximate an object having complex geometry. The general algorithms of bounding box include bounding sphere [1, 2], aligned-axis bounding box (AABB) [3, 4], oriented bounding box (OBB) [5,6,7], fixed directions hulls (FDH) [8], discrete orientation polytopes (k-DOP) [9, 10], etc., they are widely applied in collision detection, mold design, product packaging design, picture processing and pattern recognition field. The two functions were commonly regarded as the accurate and valid method to obtain the minimum oriented bounding box They were only operated through manually selecting a plane, a line or a set of axes to be the reference of OBB’s first moment, and it was unable to recognize the reference automatically. This article proposed an algorithm for the OBB based on principal axis of inertia (IPA OBB) combined with CATIA structural tree recursive traversal algorithm according to CAA V5 Automation API, to implement an automated solution of the engineering acceptable minimum oriented bounding box of CATIA model successfully

Algorithm Ideas

A CATPart?

Findings

Conclusion