Reverse engineering for rapid product development: a state of the art

This paper presents a state of the art of reverse engineering for rapid product development. This domain concerns both 3D measurement for comparison between the CAD reference model and the discrete data (point clouds, CT contours), and data acquisition for CAD modeling (surface and volume modeling from grids of set of points or contours). During last year, some sensors technologies, new sensors and software appeared on the market of rapid product development (stereovision and numerical vision, photogrammetry, CT scanners,...). Others companies, like vendors of laser-based sensors, improved the complete information chain (data acquisition, point filtering, grid and net computation, human-machine interface). The sensors can be interfaced with different structures, like CMM or mobile arms (like Fare). This paper presents the main aspects of reverse engineering domain, from the sensors used for data acquisition to software for data computation and to software for part modeling from point clouds.