Industrial Inspection and Previous:

Industrial Inspection and

Introduction

Even as CAD/CAM allows us to design and manufacture increasingly complex objects with tighter tolerances, it can be used to aid us in ensuring that those tolerances are met. This is the inspection problem, and entails the use of highly accurate (and most likely, expensive) sensing equipment in combination with a design specification, typically a CAD model. The reverse engineering problem has similar goals, but the CAD model is not available.

The objective of this research project is to explore the basis for a consistent software and hardware environment, and a flexible system that is capable of performing a variety of inspection and reverse engineering activities. In particular, we will concentrate on the adaptive automatic extraction of some properties of the world to be sensed and on the subsequent use of the sensed data for producing reliable descriptions of the sensed environments for manufacturing and/or description refinement purposes. We use an observer agent with some sensing capabilities (vision and touch) to actively gather data (measurements) of mechanical parts.

In our research, we have concentrated on a subset of mechanical parts, namely machined or milled parts (as opposed to castings, extrusions, etc.). By selecting this subset, we have been able to formulate assumptions about the objects which we are sensing which make our sensing methods more efficient. In addition, we are able to assume that sensing environment will be controllable.

This paper will give an overview of our research. Detailed technical information can be found in related technical reports (see [22][21][20]).