Jonathan C. Owen

Feature-based reverse engineering of mechanical parts

Reverse engineering of mechanical parts requires extraction of information about an instance of a particular part sufficient to replicate the part using appropriate manufacturing techniques. This is important in a wide variety of situations, since functional CAD models are often unavailable or unusable for parts which must be duplicated or modified. Computer vision techniques applied to three-dimensional (3-D) data acquired using noncontact, 3-D position digitizers have the potential for significantly aiding the process. Serious challenges must be overcome, however, if sufficient accuracy is to be obtained and if models produced from sensed data are to be truly useful for manufacturing operations. The paper describes a prototype of a reverse engineering system which uses manufacturing features as geometric primitives. This approach has two advantages over current practice. The resulting models can be directly imported into feature-based CAD systems without loss of the semantics and topological information inherent in feature-based representations. In addition, the feature-based approach facilitates methods capable of producing highly accurate models, even when the original 3-D sensor data has substantial errors.

A subject-indexed bibliography of discrete event dynamic systems

A subject-indexed bibliography of discrete event dynamic systems is given. Each subject is briefly described and some characteristic topics and references for each subject are listed. The complete reference list is provided on the ftp-site and instructions how to retrieve related files are given.<<ETX>>

Industrial inspection and reverse engineering

Proposes a new design for inspection and reverse engineering environments. The authors have designed and experimented with such an environment for capturing sense data of mechanical parts in an intelligent way. They construct a sensing /spl rarr/ CAD interface for the automatic reconstruction of parts from visual data. They briefly discuss the use of the dynamic recursive finite state machine (DRFSM) as a new discrete event dynamic system (DEDS) tool for controlling inspection and exploration. They also implement a graphical interface for designing DRFSM DEDS controllers.<<ETX>>

A sensing strategy for the reverse engineering of machined parts

The reverse engineering of machined parts requires sensing an existing part and producing a design (and perhaps a manufacturing process) for it. We have developed a reverse engineering system that has proven effective with a set of machined parts. This paper describes the system, presents some results, and discusses strategy for a new system.

Discrete event control for inspection and reverse engineering

We address the problem of intelligent sensing in this work. In particular, we use discrete event dynamic systems (DEDS) to guide the sensing of mechanical parts for industrial inspection and reverse engineering.<<ETX>>

A dynamic recursive approach for autonomous inspection and reverse engineering

Abstract This paper addresses the application of discrete event dynamic systems (DEDS) for autonomous sensing and inspection as part of the reverse engineering process. A dynamic recursive context for DEDS is presented and its usage for managing a complex hybrid system which has continuous, discrete and symbolic aspects is illustrated. We suggest that the dynamic recursive context is aptly suited to controlling and observing the active inspection of machined parts using such a hybrid system.