The importance of quantifying tolerance in the specification, design, manufacturing and inspection process is obvious. Unfortunately, adequate representations of tolerance do not exist which permit dialog between these various aspects of the manufacturing process. This lack is particularly acute in systems which tightly integrate all of the aspects of prototyping.
In this work we propose an approach for the inspection and reverse engineering of machined parts that is based on knowledge of the actual manufacturing process for the parts to be inspected. A principal benefit of this approach is that sensing can be focused on those areas of parts where violations of tolerance specifications are most likely. Process plans and NC toolpaths are used as a low-level unifying representation for the analysis of geometry and tolerances in design, manufacturing, and sensing.
A number of papers describing this activity is available for the public and can be accessed from this document.
