STEP to DMIS: Automated generation of inspection plans from CAD data

The present work is concerned with automated generation of process plans for CMM based part inspection from CAD models. The importance and advantage of the proposed system is that it uses STEP (ISO 10303) file of the part to be inspected as an input and gives inspection process plan of the part as an output in DMIS (ISO 22903) format. This is the first time an effort has been made to integrate design and inspection using two international standards. This is made possible due to recent developments in STEP to incorporate part tolerance information which is essential for inspection automation. The Edition 2 of STEP AP 203 which was released recently has this provision. The inspection automation system proposed in this work has three automation modules. First module uses geometric and product information of part to identify surface features to be probed for inspection. Second module automates setup planning and probe selection accounting for feature accessibility. Probe path planning and generation of inspection plan are part of third automation module. The proposed system has been developed and tested for inspection automation of manufactured parts to be inspected in an industrial environment.