AN OVERVIEW OF AUTOMATIC FEATURE RECOGNITION TECHNIQUES FOR COMPUTER-AIDED PROCESS PLANNING

In recent years, various researchers have come up with different ways and means to integrate CAD and CAM. Automatic feature recognition from a CAD solid model, for downstream applications like process planning, greatly impacts the level of integration. A brief discussion and revi ew of methods used in automatic feature recognition like cell division , cavity volume, convex hull, laminae slicing and other miscellaneous techniques which include graph-based and hint-based feature recognitio n methods have been presented. Automatic feature recognition for machi ning is essentially viewed as an exercise in decomposition. It is furt her confirmed that even in a ''design by features'' environment, the n eed for feature recognition is inevitable.