Direct integration of reverse engineering and rapid prototyping based on the properties of NURBS or B-spline

As product varieties increase and life cycles shorten, the need to reduce product development time becomes more critical to maintain competitiveness in the market. The reduction of the product development time, therefore, requires revolutionary improvements rather than gradual changes in technology. Based on a novel strategy the procedure for integration of reverse engineering and rapid prototyping was developed in this paper. Direct integration of reverse engineering and rapid prototyping is not a new issue and its importance has been demonstrated by many authors. However, all traditional algorithms for integration of RE and RP operate on scattered points directly such that some useful information for example curvature, normal and geometric shape, which are necessary for adaptive slicing in RP, cannot be obtained. To resolve the difficult dilemma a new algorithm is developed to build a bridge between scattered points and adaptive slicing.