Geometric algorithms for direct integration of reverse engineering and rapidly reconfigurable mold manufacturing

摘要

A large class of industrial produce such as injection modeling, casting, stamping, and forming relies on the long and costly precursor of design and fabrication of dies and molds. However, the current market trend is moving towards mass customization in which every product can be customized by the customers to adjust to their needs, and furthermore a theme of today's manufacturing environment is quick changes of customers' requirements, which call for cheap and fine product with short delivery times. The trend requires revolutionary improvements rather than gradual changes in technology. This has led to the development of direct integration of reverse engineering and rapidly reconfigurable mold manufacturing. Several geometric algorithms for direct integration of rapidly reconfigurable mold manufacturing and reverse engineering for fabricating physical objects are presented in this paper. The existing algorithms, which are based on CAD models, for interference detection and elimination, are adapted to resolve the possible pin-cavity and pin-pin interference problems involving in rapidly reconfigurable mold manufacturing based on digitized points. Since the proposed method is based on surface approximation, error estimation and compensation are also taken into consideration in this paper.