On digital sampling for free-form surface in reverse engineering

High-efficiency and high-accuracy digital measurement for free-form surfaces is most important in reverse engineering. In this paper, a intelligent and high-efficiency sampling approach is presented. The coordinate measuring machine carry point laser probe to track the free-form surface. In the process of line-by-line sampling, the spacing of sampling lines can be automatically adjusted to obviously reduce the amount of point clouds. Sampling points´ coordinate is predicted to improve the accuracy when the measuring is high-speed and non-stop. A workpiece with free-form surface is tentative measured and the point clouds that can used to be reconstructed by mastercam is processing via removing burrs and convex method. Finally, experimental results verify the effectiveness of the sampling method.