Automatic extraction of mechanical interlocking features from CAD model

Abstract

This paper represents, classifies, and automatic extracts the mechanical interlocking features (MIFs) from the CAD model. Mechanical interlocking features (MIFs) are geometric features of two or more components when physically interlock that prevent the relative movement in any or certain directions. A set of contact faces in proximity and their characteristic arrangement are used to represent the MIFs. This characteristics arrangement of contact faces and their topological relationships help in classification of MIFs. It is very difficult to manually extract the large number of MIFs from CAD models. It is therefore desirable to develop a set of algorithms to extract the MIFs from CAD model. CAD assembly models from industrial domain has been used in order to validate the proposed approach.