Point projection-based contour-parallel tool path from point cloud

Traditional reverse engineering (RE) often involves complicated and time-consuming CAD model reconstruction, which can be inefficient or unnecessary in practical scenarios focused on rapid shape replication and design validation. Therefore, a method is proposed in this paper for generating contour-parallel tool paths directly from point clouds, bypassing CAD model reconstruction, and it is particularly suited for parts with holes or island features. In this method, boundary points are first extracted and sequenced, and then boundaries are employed as initial tool paths to generate subsequent tool paths through successively offsetting. In the tool path offsetting, a novel point projection-based offsetting strategy is presented to calculate accurate cutter contact (CC) points in the neighbouring tool path, and the self-intersections appearing in offset CC paths are eliminated simultaneously. To simplify the offsetting operations, a simple merging strategy between the inner boundary and the generated offset tool path is presented to remove the undesired intra-intersections. Case studies demonstrate that the proposed method can nicely generate continuous and boundary conformal contour-parallel tool paths directly on point clouds with and without holes. Different from traditional CAD modelling, the proposed method provides a fast and efficient alternative for shape-oriented RE tasks.