A Unifying Framework Previous: Tests along the

Conclusions

We propose toolpaths with tolerances as a unifying approach to dealing with tolerance issues across design, manufacturing and inspection. Not only does this permit us to answer questions concerning design and manufacturing processes, but also gives a way to determine places in the process and on the part where sensing is useful to ensuring that tolerances are met. We have developed algorithms and implementations based on interval splines. We consider our major contributions to be:

• Proposing inspection strategies based on manufacturing knowledge as opposed to data or geometry driven techniques.

• Proposing a new unifying framework for tolerance representation, analysis, and recovery, across manufacturing, design, and sensing for inspection.

• Showing that lower-level manufacturing features such as tool paths provide a unified framework to analyze tolerances in design and manufacture of machined parts.

• Toolpath-based computational framework for error, uncertainty, and tolerance representation in the manufacturing, CAD, and inspection domains.

• Using a CAD specification of a part defined in terms of the machining operations (toolpaths) which produce its shape to structure the sensing strategy, design, and manufacturing processes (analogous to operational semantics for defining a high level program in terms of the particular architecture upon which it executes).

• Using 2-D and 3-D interval Bezier curves for toolpath representation, and developing the corresponding interval spline algorithms to answer tolerance questions across sensing, design, and manufacturing.