Sculptured surface reconstruction from CMM measurement data by a software iterative approach

Abstract

The reverse engineering approach is being widely applied in designing and manufacturing of sculptured surfaces. The first step in the reverse engineering process is collection of data lying on the surface. When using a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) with a touch trigger probe for digitizing data points, the probe radius must be compensated according to normal vectors. Previous works were addressed on the iterative measurement procedure to reduce the error caused by the compensation. The major problem of iterative methods is time consumption in digitization. This paper proposes a new architecture based on look-up table that keeps the estimated normal vectors of the measurement data to refine the data points digitized by CMM. The digitized data are first fitted into several NURBS curves by interpolation. The skinning method is then applied to interpolate these curves. Thus a smooth NURBS surface can be constructed and more accurate normal vectors of the measurement points can be obtained to compensate for the probe radius. By using this software iterative technique, we need only one digitization procedure. Therefore, much time can be saved and the efficiency of reverse engineering can be improved.