Interfacing reverse engineering data to rapid prototyping

Rapid prototyping has become an increasing part of product development process chains resulting in reduced time to market and reduced development costs. As manufacturers strive to further reduce development cycles to maintain market competitiveness, the use of reverse: engineering technologies have started to play kev roles in the product development cycles. integration of these technologies into existing development cycles provides tools to maintain design integrity during development stages as well as between successive product lines. One aspect of reverse engineering is the interfacing of data obtained from these technologies to manufacturing processes such as rapid prototyping. This paper discusses work at Daimler-Benz to develop a set of interfacing tools as part of a larger reverse engineering process loop. These tools include facilities to generate contiguous surface meshes from a collection of measured views as well as automatic feature detection and hole closure.