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This dissertation is to develop a new method to automate the form feature recognition, part reconstruction and machinable form feature (MFF) extraction from a 2D CAD data. To be more specific, the dissertation is organized as two phases. First, a method is developed to recognize 3D form features from 2D CAD data and to build form feature adjacency graph(FFAG) for 3D part reconstruction. Second, a method for automatic extraction of machinable form features from an FFAG model. These two phases are designed in such a way that they can work individually or jointly. The 3D part reconstruction process consists of four main stages: (1) to use the divide-and-conquer strategy to extract the vertex-edge data from each 2D engineering drawing in the IGES format, (2) to develop a set of production rules to facilitate form feature extraction, and (3) to use a sweeping operation and a volumetric intersection operation to get 3D part base, (4) to construct the form feature adjacency graph from the recognized form features and the part base; then reconstruct the 3D part according to the spatial relations given in the FFAG model. The process of machinable form features extraction uses the FFAG representation as the input and involves the following steps: (1) extract the removable volumes by the volumetric intersection of a cuboid stock and the swept subparts of a set of 3-view drawing contours, (2) substitute the local protrusion by their bounding envelop volume minus complemented volumes, (3) check the inclusion relationship to obtain the resultant removable volume, and (4) classify the removable volumes into varoous types of MFF using MFF extraction algorithm. The attributes of extracted MFFs include related geometric datum, sequences and possible tooling entrance directions, etc. Detailed examples are included to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed system. And the simulation results and discussions are also reported.
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