Abstract
Three-dimensional data acquisition, surface registration and integration as well as subsequent rapid manufacturing are important processes in reverse engineering. This paper describes a reverse engineering system for rapid manufacturing of complex objects. The system consists of a three-dimensional digitizer (3D Optical Digitizing System), surface reconstruction software and a rapid prototyping machine. The surface reconstruction software has three major components: 1) range view registration by an iterative closed-form solution, which uses Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) tree to accelerate computation; 2) range surface integration by reconstructing an implicit function to update the volumetric grid; and 3) iso-surface extraction by a Marching Cubes algorithm. The surface reconstruction software exports models in STL format for rapid prototyping. A FDM 2000 machine is used to manufacture products. Examples are included to illustrate the systems and the methods.
