Use of reverse engineering method for rapid product development

The design models of a new product in general are created using clay models or wooden mock-ups. The reverse engineering (RE) technology enables us to quickly create the CAD model of the new product by capturing the surface of the model using laser digitizers or coordinate measuring machines. Rapid prototyping (RP) is another technology that can reduce the product development time by fabricating the physical prototype of a part using a layered manufacturing technique. In reverse engineering process, however, the digitizer generates an enormous amount of point data, and it is time consuming and also inefficient to create surfaces out of these data. In addition, the surfacing operation takes a great deal of time and skill and becomes a bottleneck. In rapid prototyping, a faceted model called STL file has been the industry standard for providing the CAD input to RP machines. It approximates the CAD model of a part using many planar triangular patches and has drawbacks. A novel procedure that overcomes these problems and integrates RE with RP is proposed. Algorithms that drastically reduce the point clouds data have been developed. These methods will facilitate the use of reverse engineered geometric data for rapid prototyping, and thereby will contribute in reducing the product development time.