Adaptive sampling method for inspection planning on CMM for free-form surfaces

Coordinate measurement machines (CMMs) have been widely used in inspecting mechanical parts with higher accuracy. Both the distribution and the number of the sampled points on measurand have an important effect on the efficiency and quality of the measurement of CMMs. In this paper, an adaptive sampling method is proposed for inspection planning on CMM for free-form surface. The points are iteratively sampled from a form error model, which is constructed by superimposing appropriate form errors on the nominal data. Moreover, a modified algorithm is introduced to determine the deviation of two point sets for the improvement of the inspecting accuracy, and the inspection uncertainty is also analyzed. A comparison is performed between the proposed method and the two well-known sampling methods, which are the equi-parametric method and the patch mean Gaussian curvature-based method, both simulated and experiment results show the effectiveness and robustness of this method.