To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by ...

Chapter 1: Introduction 21.1 MotivationComputer aided design (CAD) combined with computer aided manufacturing (CAM)has revolutionized many engineering disciplines since the 1980’s. In particular, CADand CAM technologies have catered to the needs of the automobile manufacturers. Adesigner can now rapidly fabricate a real-world tangible object from a conceptual CADdescription. The process of designing and manufacturing components using a computeris often referred to as computer aided engineering. In this context, we would like tointroduce the idea of reverse engineering that begins with the product and works throughthe design process in the opposite direction to arrive at a product definition statement. Indoing so, it uncovers as much information as possible about the design ideas that wereused to produce that particular product. By design ideas, we mean the shape andtopology of the surfaces used at the time of modeling. At this point, we would like toemphasize that our focus is only on the geometric aspect of reverse engineering and noton the functional aspect of these mechanical components.Reverse engineering aids the electronic dissemination and archival of information inaddition to the prospect of re-creating an out-of-production component. More recently,reverse engineering techniques play a significant role in real-time rapid inspection andvalidation in the production line. The traditional approach to reverse engineering hasbeen the use of coordinate measuring machines (CMM) that require a probe in contactwith the object at the time of digitization. Though CMMs are accurate some applicationsdemand non-contact digitization.In Figure 1.1 we illustrate the process of reverse engineering as the reversal of CAM.We show that the reverse engineering of the disc brake involves acquiring 3D positiondata in the point cloud. We then represent geometry of the object in terms of surfacepoints and tessellated piecewise smooth surfaces. We now need to represent the pointcloud in a form that the CAM system can interpret and manufacture.EngineeringReverse EngineeringFigure 1.1: Engineering and reverse engineering.