Feature recognition from orthographic drawings for sheet metal components

Feature Based Systems (FBS) capture information regarding manufacturing, function, and assembly at the design stage. This approach generates simple and easy to use database, which is necessary to integrate CAD/CAM. Most of the FBS use solid models, as they provide the most concise representation of part geometry. However special hardware and software are required for solid modeling. Also in majority of the industries, the design data currently exists in the form of 2D orthographic drawings as 3D modeling softwares are too expensive. This paper describes a fully automated experimental feature recognition system for process planning, which extracts the feature information from 2D orthographic drawing of sheet metal components for further use to generate process plan without any user interaction.