scholarly journals Integrating Multiple Engineering Resources in a Virtual Environment for Reverse Engineering Legacy Mechanical Parts

Author(s):  
Suraj R. Musuvathy ◽  
David E. Johnson ◽  
H. James de St. Germain ◽  
Elaine Cohen ◽  
Chimiao Xu ◽  
...  

Reverse engineering is a time-consuming and technically formidable process that is increasingly becoming an economic imperative due to replacement costs. The Multiple Engineering Resources aGent Environment (MERGE) system, introduced in this paper, is a new approach toward reverse engineering whose architecture and modules are driven specifically by the requirements of legacy engineering. Legacy engineering scenarios presume availability of multiple (possibly incomplete or inconsistent) sources of information, lack of digital descriptions of the parts, constrained time restrictions and need for significant domain knowledge expertise. The reverse engineering process must yield modern CAD models capable of driving state-of-the art CAM processes. The MERGE system aims at making the reverse engineering process more effective, using both intuitive interaction and visualization as key components, by enabling quick identification and resolution of inconsistencies among various resources in a unified environment. The MERGE system also aims at simplifying the reverse engineering process by integrating various computational agents to assist the reverse engineer in processing information and in creating the desired CAD models.

Author(s):  
H. James de St. Germain ◽  
David E. Johnson ◽  
Elaine Cohen

Reverse engineering (RE) is the process of defining and instantiating a model based on the measurements taken from an exemplar object. Traditional RE is costly, requiring extensive time from a domain expert using calipers and/or coordinate measurement machines to create new design drawings/CAD models. Increasingly RE is becoming more automated via the use of mechanized sensing devices and general purpose surface fitting software. This work demonstrates the ability to reverse-engineer parts by combining feature-based techniques with freeform surface fitting to produce more accurate and appropriate CAD models than previously possible.


Author(s):  
Mark Snider ◽  
Sudhakar Teegavarapu ◽  
D. Scott Hesser ◽  
Joshua D. Summers

Reverse engineering has gained importance over the past few years due to an intense competitive market aiding in the survivability of a company. This paper examines the reverse engineering process and what, how, and why it can assist in making a better design. Two well known reverse engineering methodologies are explored, the first by Otto and Wood and the second by Ingle. Each methodology is compared and contrasted according to the protocols and tools used. Among some of the reverse engineering tools detailed and illustrated are: Black box, Fishbone, Function Structure, Bill of Material, Exploded CAD models, Morphological Matrix, Subtract and Operate Procedure (SOP), House of Quality matrix, and FMEA. Even though both methodologies have highly valued tools, some of the areas in reverse engineering need additional robust tooling. This paper presents new and expanded tooling to augment the existing methods in hopes of furthering the understanding of the product, and process. Tools like Reverse Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (RFMEA), Connectivity graphs, and inter-relation matrix increase the design efficiency, quality, and the understanding of the reverse engineering process. These tools have been employed in two industry projects and one demonstrative purpose for a Design for Manufacture Class. In both of these scenarios, industry and academic, the users found that the augmented tools were useful in capturing and revealing information not previously realized.


Author(s):  
Ghazanfar Ali Shah ◽  
Jean-Philippe Pernot ◽  
Arnaud Polette ◽  
Franca Giannini ◽  
Marina Monti

Abstract This paper introduces a novel reverse engineering technique for the reconstruction of editable CAD models of mechanical parts' assemblies. The input is a point cloud of a mechanical parts' assembly that has been acquired as a whole, i.e. without disassembling it prior to its digitization. The proposed framework allows for the reconstruction of the parametric CAD assembly model through a multi-step reconstruction and fitting approach. It is modular and it supports various exploitation scenarios depending on the available data and starting point. It also handles incomplete datasets. The reconstruction process starts from roughly sketched and parameterized geometries (i.e 2D sketches, 3D parts or assemblies) that are then used as input of a simulated annealing-based fitting algorithm, which minimizes the deviation between the point cloud and the reconstructed geometries. The coherence of the CAD models is maintained by a CAD modeler that performs the updates and satisfies the geometric constraints as the fitting process goes on. The optimization process leverages a two-level filtering technique able to capture and manage the boundaries of the geometries inside the overall point cloud in order to allow for local fitting and interfaces detection. It is a user-driven approach where the user decides what are the most suitable steps and sequence to operate. It has been tested and validated on both real scanned point clouds and as-scanned virtually generated point clouds incorporating several artifacts that would appear with real acquisition devices.


Author(s):  
Francesco Buonamici ◽  
Monica Carfagni

Reverse Engineering (RE), also known as “CAD reconstruction”, aims at the reconstruction of 3D geometric models of objects/mechanical parts, starting from 3D measured data (points/mesh). In recent years, considerable developments in RE were achieved thanks to both academic and industrial research (e.g. RE software packages). The aim of this work is to provide an overview of state of the art techniques and approaches presented in recent years (considering at the same time tools and methods provided by commercial CAD software and RE systems). In particular, this article focuses on the “constrained fitting” approach, which considers geometrical constraints between the generated surfaces, improving the reconstruction result. On the basis of the overview, possible theoretical principles are drafted with the aim of suggest new strategies to make the CAD reconstruction process more effective in order to obtain more ready/usable CAD models. Finally, a new RE framework is briefly outlined: the proposed approach hypothesizes a tool built within the environment of an existing CAD system and considers the fitting of a custom-built archetypal model, defined with all the a-priori known dimensions and constraints, to the scanned data.


2010 ◽  
Vol 97-101 ◽  
pp. 3371-3375
Author(s):  
Kai Xing Zhang ◽  
Shu Sheng Zhang ◽  
Xiao Liang Bai

The CAD models of mechanical parts usually have many blends and chamfers, and the existence of these machining features can greatly change the geometric and topological patterns of the CAD models, but the existing partial matching algorithms cannot match the CAD models which contain machining features such as blends and chamfers. In this paper, a new approach to partial matching based on the constraints of transition features is proposed. Firstly, the transition features are identified by feature recognition, and then these machining features are removed to eliminate the impacts to the geometric and topological information of the CAD models, and the attribute adjacent graph is reconstructed, finally, the sub-graph isomorphism approach is used to achieve the partial matching. Experimental results show that this method can achieve partial matching of CAD models which contain machining features such as blends and chamfers, and the matching efficiency can satisfy the requirement of the engineering retrieval.


2012 ◽  
Vol 135 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane K. Curtis ◽  
Stephen P. Harston ◽  
Christopher A. Mattson

Reverse engineering is the process of extracting information about a product from the product itself. An estimate of the barrier and time to extract information from any product is useful for the original designer and those reverse engineering, as both are affected by reverse engineering activities. The authors have previously presented a set of metrics and parameters to estimate the barrier and time to reverse engineer a product once. This work has laid the foundation for the developments of the current paper, which address the issue of characterizing the reverse engineering time and barrier when multiple samples of the same product are reverse engineered. Frequently in practice, several samples of the same product are reverse engineered to increase accuracy, extract tolerances, or to gather additional information from the product. In this paper, we introduce metrics that (i) characterize learning in the reverse engineering process as additional product samples are evaluated and (ii) estimate the total time to reverse engineer multiple samples of the same product. Additionally, an example of reverse engineering parts from a control valve is introduced to illustrate how to use the newly developed metrics and to serve as empirical validation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 150 ◽  
pp. 06043
Author(s):  
Azli Nawawi ◽  
Mohd Hadri Mohamed Nor ◽  
Muhamad Amir Hafiz Abdul Halim ◽  
Noor Azizah Sidek

Reverse engineering (RE) process is capable of producing CAD models from the existing part without the need of a blueprints or CAD drawing. One of the method to implement RE is via 3D scanning and the main goal is to produce CAD files that have the highest accuracy possible when compared to the actual parts. Any effort to improve the 3D scanning process should be encouraged because it will save a lot of time and expenses. As a result, this research tends to investigate the effects of surface parameters (Percentage of triangles and Grids resolution) to the performance of RE. Design of Experiments (DOE) method was used and the responses are measured in terms of File size and Error percentage. From the results, it is very interesting to note that the percentage of triangles does not have a significant effect to the file size but plays a major role in minimizing the dimension error. The grids resolution has the significant effects to the file size and error percentage. It can also be concluded that in order to get the best RE performance, the percentage of triangles and file size should be set to maximum. This will ensure that the generated CAD files will have the highest accuracy and from here, high quality products can be made from the RE process.


Author(s):  
Jai Menon ◽  
Ranjit Desai ◽  
Jay Buckey

Abstract This paper extends the “cross-sectional” approach for reverse engineering, used abundantly in biomedical applications, to the mechanical domain. We propose a combination of “projective” and cross-sectional algorithms for handling physical artifacts with complex topology and geometry. In addition, the paper introduces the concept of constraint-based reverse engineering, where the constraint parameters could include one or more of the following: time, storage (memory, disk-space), network bandwidth, Quality of Service (output-resolution), and so forth. We describe a specific reverse-engineering application which uses ultrasound (tilt-echo) imaging to reverse engineer spatial enumeration (volume) representations from cross-sectional data. The constraint here is time, and we summarize how our implementation can satisfy real-time reconstruction for distribution of the volume data on the internet. We present results that show volume representations computed from static objects. Since the algorithms are tuned to satisfy time constraints, this method is extendable to reverse engineer temporally-varying (elastic) objects. The current reverse engineering processing time is constrained by the data-acquisition (tilt-echo imaging) process, and the entire reverse engineering pipeline has been optimized to compute incremental volume representations in the order of 3 seconds on a network of four processors.


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