Rapid and Precise Reverse Engineering of Complex Geometry through Multi-sensor Data Fusion

This paper presents an effective multi-sensor approach for improving the accuracy of laser scanner by using a tactile probe to perform rapid and accurate reverse engineering of complex objects. The proposed system is unique in that it includes not only the physical integration of the two digitizers but also their combination at the measurement information level. With the coordinate data acquired using the optical scanner, intelligent data segmentation and feature recognition algorithm are proposed to divide the original point set into geometric elements and free-form surfaces. The tactile probe is guided to re-measure each feature with a small number of sampling points. Then different data fusion algorithms are proposed to compensate the scanned data patches of geometric features and free-form features with the accurate tactile probing data. Finally, the compensated point data can be exploited for accurate reverse engineering of a CAD model. Through the fusion of different sensor’s information, both sensors complement each other with their advantages. Experimental results show that for the measurement of geometric surface, the proposed method can improve the accuracy of optical measurement to the accuracy of contact measurement. For free-form surface measurement, the proposed method reduces the optical measurement error from +0.032/−0.019 mm to ±0.016 mm, and the standard deviation from 0.012 mm to 0.004 mm. The measurement efficiency of proposed method is 4.5 times higher than that of contact measurement alone.