A New Approach for Tool Path Planning of 3D Machining Surfaces in Reverse Engineering Applications

Summary

This paper presents an alternative reverse engineering method to plan the tool paths for 3D machined surfaces based on vision information. The proposed method takes advantage of the nature of vision technology, which can be applied to acquire efficiently and quickly the geometrical information of the products. This technology is employed to determine the shape, region and contour of the machined component. It is a new non-contact, non-radioactive technique for surface reproduction and allows the user to recover machined surfaces with low labour skill and cost. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method has advantages over traditional methods.