Sculptured surface recognition and localization strategy in the CMM process

This paper presents a sculptured surface recognition and localization strategy for the inspection process using the CMM. First, the database is generated from the CAD data based on the Z-Layer concept. Then, the three-dimensional shape of the object on the CMM table is constructed using a vision guided CMM. Two vision cameras are implemented to guide the CMM to the object, and B-spline interpolation method is applied to generate a surface that passes through the obtained data points. As a following step, the Z-layers of the generated surface are created and the geometric properties are calculated to determine the best matching surface in the database. Rough location and orientation of the object are determined by analyzing the image data, and the minimization algorithm is applied as a next step to obtain more accurate localization results. The experimental results show that the proposed method can be applied effectively for sculptured surface recognition and localization in the inspection processes.