Matt - see below
1. Is there a very much of a market for this kind of service?
We hope so since many of the hardware and softwrae manufacturers are banking
on it (including us in the academia). On a serious note I am not able to pin
down any hard numbers for the market in reverse engineering. My previous
postings to this group did not bring any response. The problem is that all
the companies are small and tend to be closely if not privately held and its
very hard to come up with numbers. However, if you can judge by the response
in the engineering and entertainment community I think that is the way to
go. Some day perhaps Terry Wohlers would have enough motivation to do the
marketing research on all our behalf. I will donate my dollar to the cause.
2. What industries would we find the most work in? (we do alot of
aerospace work)
Aerospace is a good start. I would recommend attending one of the SME's Rev
Eng tutorials/conferences to find your peers.
3. What are some of the better CAD/Point Cloud software packages?
(currently we use Mastercam, Rhino3d, and Catia)
There are a few - Imageware, Paraform (unlreleased), Geomagic, Rapid Form
(not quite there yet) - they all range from 25K+ to 10 K in price. Sorry if
I missed any.
4. What are some additional measurement devices we might look into? (we
are looking at Faro Arms, Metricvision, and Metronor to name a few.)
Depends on the scale of the objects, precision required and skill level at
your site. It is a highly skilled enterprise even tho we all would like to
think that all we have to do is slap some NURB surfaces on the point cloud
data. Laser scanners usually tend to be fast, with more or less good
accuracy. Mechanical probes (CMM based) tend to be slow but more accurate
and require highly skilled operator. Micro scribes (hand held mechanical
probes) obviously are least accurate, require lot of accuracy and tend to be
slow since its a manual process. It really depends on what industry you are
aiming at.
Hope you donot stop looking beyond this email for answers - this is meant to
be a starter for your thought process. Do share with us what you find. We
all benefit from shared knowledge.
Thanks
AR
---------------------------------
Dr. Anshuman Razdan
Technical Director PRISM
Email: razdan@asu.edu
Web: surdas.eas.asu.edu/~razdan
MC 5106 Arizona State University
Tempe AZ 85287-5106
Phone: (602) 965 5368
Fax: (602) 965 2910
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-rp-ml@ltk.hut.fi [mailto:owner-rp-ml@ltk.hut.fi]On Behalf Of
Matt Przybylski
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 1999 11:16 PM
To: rp-ml@bart.lpt.fi
Subject: Large Scale Reverse Engineering Question
Hi all,
I work for a 3d measurement/fabrication company in Seattle, WA. We
currently use Leica Laser Trackers and Theodolites for 3d inspection and
fabrication. We can inspect and build to fairly close tolerances in
envelopes up to 100 ft.
Anyways, we areslowly starting to shift some of our resources towards
reverse engineering. This is a new process for us and is proving to be
quite a learning experience.
There are a few questions that I have and I hope that I can get some
good answers from this list.
Bear in mind that our laser trackers can collect up to 1000 points per
second and collect them in sorted or point cloud arrangements. The main
downfall is that for the most part most of our measurements have a .250 to
.750 offset (this makes for complex surfaces when we offsets the surfaces to
compensate for the target offset.).
Anyways, the questions are:
1. Is there a very much of a market for this kind of service?
2. What industries would we find the most work in? (we do alot of
aerospace work)
3. What are some of the better CAD/Point Cloud software packages?
(currently we use Mastercam, Rhino3d, and Catia)
4. What are some additional measurement devices we might look into?
(we are looking at Faro Arms, Metricvision, and Metronor to name a few.)
Thanks in advance for any help,
Matt Przybylski
Matt.Przybylski@Hexcel.com
tobogan@wa.net
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
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