SEMI-AUTOMATIC MANUFACTURING FEATURE RECOGNITION FOR FEATURE INTERACTION PROBLEM IN PROCESS PLANNING

Automatic feature recognition has been an active area of research in solid modeling for more than two decades. In fact it is considered to be the most critical component in the integration of CAD/CAM. One of the hard problems in automatic feature recognition is to recognize interacting features. The inherent complexity of this problem is due to the missing geometry/topology information in the solid model, whenever features interact. Till date, the most promising techniques have used geometric reasoning algorithms to supply the partially missing information. In this paper, we have taken a very practical approach to the feature interaction problem. Whenever our feature recognition algorithm fails to recognize interacting features correctly, we allow the user to define a new feature. This User Defined feature is then added to the existing list of features. The entire feature list is then sent to the process planning module for preparing a detailed manufacturing plan. We claim that a User Defined feature provides a novel way to address the feature interaction problem using a man-in-the-loop interface.