This grant provides funding for the development of information aggregation technologies and automated sensor planning algorithms that support information automation of multiple-sensor integrated systems for agile metrology and precision manufacturing. The developed information automation technology will be demonstrated using a multiple-sensor integrated coordinate measuring machine. This integrated system consists of a high precision coordinate measuring machine, a motorized probe, and a three-dimensional vision system. In the multiple-sensor integrated system, the active vision system will be employed in the early stage of coordinate acquisition to simultaneously acquire thousands of data points over a large spatial range, therefore capturing the global information of an object's surface geometry and feature topology will be possible. The obtained coordinate points (view cloud) will then be processed in real time by the proposed information aggregation technologies so as to extract high-level geometric abstractions, including feature boundary, feature position and orientation, feature geometry, and feature topology. These high-level geometric abstractions will provide the global information that can be used either to locate objects and to control critical dimensions when Computer Aided Design models are available or to form a preliminary description of the surface geometry and feature topology of an unknown object. The obtained preliminary description of the object will be subsequently used by the automated sensor planning algorithms to locate the most informative view of the vision system, to automatically guide the contact probe for rapid coordinate data acquisition, and to strategically control the coordinate measuring machine for high precision sampling of critical surface area.
If successful, the results of this research will be a significant advancement in sensor integration and metrology. By integrating advanced information aggregation technologies as well as automated sensor planning algorithms with the state of the art equipment, a fully automated, high speed, high precision, coordinate acquisition system will be developed for agile metrology and rapid surface digitization. In addition, since the developed system will be fully automated, it will be possible to integrate the developed technologies into various precision manufacturing processes for part localization and real-time calibration, and for the control of critical size, location, and precision dimension. This work will also have potential applications in a whole spectrum of manufacturing problems with a major impact on metrology, dimensional control, and reverse engineering.
