Classification and Automatic Feature-Based Extraction Approach for Cylindrical and Milling Parts

Introduction

The evolution of Computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacturing (CAM) systems is being done by the several researchers over the recent past decades for the low cost and high production. The conventional design and manufacturing activities would be optimized for the rise of productivity through the “integration of CAD/CAM technologies”. Computer aided process planning (CAPP) is being the communication agent between CAD and CAM, to achieve the required product. CAD files mainly consist of geometrical information of the product. The CAPP is aimed to generate the sequence of instructions used to manufacture the required product by using specified CAD data (Yusof & Latif, 2014). However, CAPP also plays a major role in integrating CAD and CAM. A successful integration of CAD and CAM is done through the automatic extraction of manufacturing product information from the CAD systems. This automatic extraction can be treated as a basic step to automate the product development from the design stage, thereafter, manufacturing and shipping stages (Yusof & Latif, 2014; Hoffmann & Joan, 1998; Gindy, 1989). Automatic feature recognition (AFR) system is also an essential tool for successful integration of design and manufacturing stages during the product development. The automatic feature recognition techniques used to identify and extract the design and manufacturing features from part models.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows; section-2 reports previous related works in the area of feature identification and extraction. Section-3 explains the definition and classification of cylindrical and milling features. The methodology for extracting cylindrical and milling features is presented in section 4. Section 5 shows system integration and implementation of algorithms through case studies and analysis of results. Sections 6 present the conclusions drawn from the work.