Manufacturing features extraction and recognition in automated process planning

Abstract Features are considered the information carriers between design and manufacturing. Manufacturing feature here refers to a certain shape of volumes which is to be removed from the blank to produce the finish part. In this paper, an Overall Removable Volume is generated through the graphically comparing a finish part and a blank. A Removable Surface-based Concave Edge (RM-CV) feature extraction approach is introduced to extract manufacturing features. The recognition of manufacturing features are performed with the programs written in C and CLIPS expert system. The General Manufacturing Feature Information Scheme (GMF-IS) is also designed to maintain the information between the features, blank and finished part. This paper covers part of the research project founded by Naval Ordnance Station.