An integrated reverse engineering approach to reconstructing free-form surfaces

An integrated reverse engineering approach to generating free-form surfaces has been developed to create CAD-compatible free-form surface models with a coordinate measurement machine and a touch trigger probe. The approach integrates data digitization and surface modelling to obtain an efficient and accurate digitization process with a collision-free exploration path, and to reconstruct least-squares bi-cubic B-spline surface models for rapid product prototyping. The whole approach is divided into two stages: the planning of boundary digitization; and the adaptive model-based digitizing process (AMDP). The planning of boundary digitization defines the exploration surface region. The AMDP then automatically explores the whole measured surface region with a collision-free exploration path, continuing until a satisfactory surface model corresponding to the user's specified digitizing accuracy is obtained. This approach significantly reduces the product development lead time and obtains a surface model with controlled digitizing accuracy. The validity and applicability of this approach are demonstrated by three practical industrial examples. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.