A novel robot surface measurement system enhanced with 3D surface reconstruction

Abstract

This paper reports a design of a novel prototype of reverse engineering equipment, which is characterised by combining a robotics laser surface measurement system with fuzzy neural network model reconstruction. The major novelty of the intelligent equipment includes, firstly scanning complex freeform surface in 3D space using a six degree of freedom robot with laser scanning head, so that 3D point cloud data with specified accuracy can be quickly collected. Secondly, implementing digital model reconstruction using an adaptive network based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). To demonstrate the efficient applicability of the developed prototype, a group of point cloud data on a surface are collected by the robot measure system, which the first section of the samples is used to train the ANFIS network; therefore a 3D digital model is reconstructed to describe the measured data in a concise equation. Comparison of the output from the reconstructed 3D digital model with the second section of the measured data validates the expectation that the ANFIS model can match the real surface satisfactorily.