Measurement point sampling method for inspection of parts with free-form surfaces

Abstract

Parts must be measured to evaluate the manufacturing accuracy in order to check whether their dimension is in expected tolerance. In engineering, parts with free-form surfaces are generally measured by high-precision coordinate-measuring machines. The measurement accuracy is usually improved by increasing the density of measurement points, which is time-consuming and costly. In this article, a novel sampling method of measurement points for free-form surface inspection is proposed. First, surface inspection is simplified into the inspection of a number of section curves of the surface. Second, B-spline curves constructed with an iterative method are employed to approximate these section curves. Subsequently, data points necessary to construct the B-spline curves are taken as the measurement points. Finally, the proposed method is compared with other two sampling methods. The results indicate that the proposed method greatly reduced the number of measurement points without decreasing the precision of surface modeling.