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 help ensure that those tolerances are met. This is the inspection problem, and entails the use of highly accurate 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 flexible software and hardware environment for a variety of inspection and reverse engineering activities. The emphasis of our research was on devising a framework for control of sensing systems for inspection and reverse engineering. As such, we felt it was appropriate to use low-cost, easy-to-implement vision sensing and simulated touch sensing. In this context, we will concentrate on the adaptive extraction of world properties and on producing reliable descriptions of sensed objects for manufacturing and/or refinement purposes. We use an observer agent with some sensing capabilities to actively gather measurements of mechanical parts.

In our research [16][17][13][18][15], 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 which simplify our sensing methods. In addition, we are able to assume that sensing environment will be controllable. This paper will give an overview of our research.