Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing

The data and parameters derived from the sensing agent are then to be fed into the CAD system for designing the geometry of the part(s) under inspection. We intend to use the _1design environment [2,11,25,29] for that purpose. The goal is to provide automatic programming interfaces from the data obtained in the sensing module to the _1programming environment. The parametric and 3-D point descriptions are to be integrated to provide consistent and efficient surface descriptions for the CAD tool. For pure inspection purposes the computer aided geometric description of parts could be used as a driver for guiding both the robotic manipulator and the coordinate measuring machine for exploring the object and recognizing discrepancies between the real part and the model.

The computer aided design parameters are then to be used for manufacturing the prototypes. Considerable effort has been made for automatically moving from a computer aided geometric model to a process plan for making the parts on the appropriate NC machines and then to automatically generate the appropriate machine instructions [9,10,12]. We intend to use the Monarch VMC-45 milling machine as the manufacturing host. The _1system will produce the NC code for manufacturing the parts.