Developing frameworks for inspection and reverse engineering applications is an essential activity in many engineering disciplines. Usually, too much time is spent in designing hardware and software environments, in order to be able to attack a specific problem. One of the purposes of this work is to provide a basis for solving a class of inspection and reverse engineering problems.
CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design, Manufacturing) typically involves the design and manufacture of a mechanical part. The problem of reverse engineering is to take an existing mechanical part as the point of departure and to inspect or produce a design, and perhaps a manufacturing process, for the part. The techniques that we explore can hopefully be used for a variety of applications. We use an observer agent to sense the current world environment and make some measurements, then supply relevant information to a control module that will be able to make some design choices that will later affect manufacturing and/or inspection activities. This involves both autonomous and semi-autonomous sensing.
We use a recursive dynamic strategy for exploring machine parts. A discrete event dynamic system (DEDS) [7,16,17,23,24,27] framework is designed for modeling and structuring the sensing and control problems. The dynamic recursive context for finite state machines (DRFSM) is introduced as a new DEDS tool for utilizing the recursive nature of the mechanical parts under consideration. This paper describes what this means in more detail.
Next, we discuss the objectives and research questions. Then we discuss the methodology and proceed to describe some experiments and results. We conclude by detailing the current developments and the integration efforts.