Free-form surface inspection techniques state of the art review

Precision inspection has been widely used in manufacturing to measure the dimensional accuracy of parts and products to meet the quality requirements. For regular geometric features, coordinate-measuring machines (CMM) can be used effectively to assess the accuracy and tolerances. For parts with free-form surfaces, the inspection becomes complex. Therefore, numerous researches have been carried out to tackle both fundamental and application issues concerning free-form surface inspection. In addition to academic research, some commercial packages have also been developed. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of methodologies, techniques and various processes of inspections of parts with free-form surfaces. The specific topics cover: measurement data acquiring methods including contact and non-contact measurement approaches; inspection planning; geometric description methods of design models or measurement data; and, the free-form surface localization and comparison techniques, which are emphasized in this paper and mainly include the establishment of corresponding relationship, 3D transformation solving, measurement data to design model comparison or surface to surface distance calculations. Other issues, such as the influence factors to the localization/registration process, definition and inspection of free-form surface tolerance, and discussions on the functions of some commercial inspection packages available on market, are also discussed. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.