Error analysis and point data processing of reconstructed surface by reverse engineering

Abstract

Reverse engineering is the processes of extracting design information (data points) from a product in an attempt to duplicate it. But when generating a surface using the acquired data points, there are a lot of surface inaccuracies compared to the original CAD model. The goal of this work is to reveal the errors between the shapes through a comparative study of the original CAD models and the generated surface models. To accomplish this task a mouse structure and an aerofoil are modelled in CAD Software and their NC codes are generated using master CAM. The models are then machined with these codes in CNC milling machine. Using portable CMM, laser scanning is performed on the fabricated models to collect the data points. With these data points the surface models are generated in GEOMAGIC and compared with the input models structured using CAD software. On comparison, it is inferred that the number of input data points of point cloud data significantly affects the surface accuracy of the reverse engineered model especially at the edges of the model. Experimental results on error analysis are reported which validates the above work.