Reverse Engineering System Based 3D Digitizer

Reverse engineering is a technique that helps designers to quickly generate computer interpretable data from existing physical objects. It can be used for generating CAD data from a mechanical part of high precision, or generating computer animation characters from physical mock-ups. We developed a low precision reverse engineering system that is composed of surface/solid generation software and a contact type commercial 3D digitizer. A unique point sampling procedure has been devised to easily form solid topology from the sampled data. It was also shown that STL data for rapid prototyping was successfully generated from the solid.