A reverse engineering method based on haptic volume removing

This paper presents a new reverse engineering methodology that is based on haptic volume removing. When a physical object is to be digitized, it is first buried in a piece of virtual clay that is generated with the help of a fixture. Now digitizing the physical object is by simply chipping away the virtual clay with a position tracker that is attached to a haptic device PHANToM^®. While chipping away the clay, the user can see on the computer monitor what is emerging and at the same time feel the chipping force from the haptic device. By so doing, reverse engineering is seamlessly integrated into haptic volume sculpting that is now widely used for conceptual design. Furthermore, the proposed method has eliminated the need to merge point clouds that are digitized from different views using current digitizers. The virtual clay volume is represented by a spatial run-length encoding scheme. A prototype system has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed new method through a case study. The strengths and weaknesses of the presented method are analyzed and the applicability is discussed.