Automated precision measurement of surface profile in CAD-directed inspection

The authors present an optimal match scheme that aligns the measurement data with the design data in CAD-directed dimensional inspection. The principle of this scheme is to determine the actual measured points on the nominal surface by minimizing the sum of the squared distances of the measurement data from the surface with respect to the parameters of a rigid body transformation. Its computational efficiency and robustness against singularity are discussed. Two applications are examined. The first is determining the design coordinate system with respect to a machine coordinate system. The second is comparative analysis for precision measurement. For determining the design coordinate system, a sensitivity measure is proposed and confirmed experimentally. For error comparative analysis, a statistical model is developed to determine the minimum number of required measurement points so that the sampled points can closely represent the entire population