FEATURE RECOGNITION FOR NC PART PROGRAMMING

This paper reports on some current research concerning the automated r ecognition of manufacturing features on solid models to support the ge neration of NC machine code for process planning and manufacturing. Ge neric feature recognition algorithms previously developed by the autho rs for polyhedral objects have been considerably extended to enable th e interrogation of more complex geometry and, in particular, the recog nition of both 'closed' and 'open' manufacturing features. Once identi fied, these feature profiles are extruded to form 3D volumes, the so c alled Delta-Volumes, which are then passed to the solids machining pac kage SolidCAM. (4) A Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been designed which allows interpretation of the manufacturing features from the geo metry of a component and keeps track of volumes created. The algorithm has also been integrated into SolidCAM and in such mode provides seam less operation within a commercial CAM system. (C) 1998 Elsevier Scien ce B.V. All rights reserved.