Direct tool path regeneration for physical object modification from digitized points in reverse engineering

To reuse the tool paths in tool path regeneration for physical object modification in reverse engineering, this paper presented a novel CL tool path regeneration algorithm based on the CL tool path generated from the measured data points. When a physical part captured is modified, the new tool paths for the modified part can be regenerated efficiently by only calculating the affected CL tool paths on the modified region. With this strategy, if a measured physical part has been modified and the CL tool paths were generated directly from its corresponding digitized points, the affected CL tool paths are identified first; then, new CL tool paths are regenerated and used to replace the affected CL tool paths for a given machining accuracy delta. The tool paths not affected are maintained in the new NC-codes. For the method, only the tool paths for the modified regions need to be regenerated; thus, the tool path, which combines the original and modified tool paths, can be regenerated efficiently.