One of the essential problems in the measurement of the freeform surfaces on a coordinate measuring machine is to design appropriate sampling plans to improve the industrial practice in terms of the trade-off between the sampling accuracy and the efficiency. This paper presents a curve network based sampling method to optimize the distribution of the sampling locations so that the traverse path with minimal distance can be achieved for the measurement with required sampling accuracy. The method iteratively extracts two sets of iso-planar curves along two different directions on the parts to form a curve network which is used to reconstruct the measured surfaces based on the Gordon surface fitting method. Two criteria are integrated to determine the locations of the sampled curves in the sampling process, including the surface complexity and the deviation of the reconstructed surfaces from the CAD model. Both the computer simulation and the actual measurement are conducted to verify the superior sampling efficiency of the proposed method to the conventional raster fashion sampling in measuring freeform surfaces.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.