A reverse engineering system for rapid manufacturing of complex objects

This paper presents a reverse engineering system for rapid modeling and manufacturing of products with complex surfaces. The system consists of three main components: a 3D optical digitizing system, a surface reconstruction software and a rapid prototyping machine. The unique features of the 3D optical digitizing system include the use of white-light source, and cost-effective and quick image acquisition. The surface reconstruction process consists of three major steps: (1) range view registration by an iterative closed-form solution, (2) range surface integration by reconstructing an implicit function to update the volumetric grid, and (3) iso-surface extraction by the Marching Cubes algorithm. The modeling software exports models in STL format, which are used as input to an FDM 2000 machine to manufacture products. The examples are included to illustrate the systems and the methods. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.