Automated inspection planning system for CMMs

Abstract

Coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) have been recognized as a powerful tool for inspection and measurement purposes. Maximum utilization of CMMs requires the development of an automated inspection planning system. A computer-aided inspection planning (CAIP) system leads to minimization of the total time needed for inspection process and hence the overall cost of the final product. This work introduces a computer aided inspection system that reads a B-rep solid model in SAT format as an input and produces the final CMM program in DMIS format. The system includes the following: rule-based feature recognition module that identifies and extracts the necessary inspection features from the solid model, sampling strategy module to determine the number and the location of the needed measuring points on each inspection feature, accessibility analysis module to determine the number of probe orientations that can reach the measured points without collision, finally, a clustering module to minimize the total number of probe orientations need to fully inspect the entire part. All algorithms are developed using ACIS geometric kernel and object oriented programming using C++. The results are verified on CMM.