Process Planning For Additive/Subtractive Solid Freeform Fabrication Using Medial Axis Transform

PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SOLID FREEFORM FABRICATION USING MEDIAL AXIS TRANSFORM
a dissertation submitted to the department of mechanical engineering and the committee on graduate studies of stanford university in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy
By Ju-Hsien Kao June 1999
c Copyright 1999 by Ju-Hsien Kao All Rights Reserved
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I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Fritz B. Prinz (Principal Adviser)
Mark R. Cutkosky
Kosuke Ishii
Approved for the University Committee on Graduate Studies:
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Abstract
Additive/Subtractive Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) integrates material addition (deposition) and removal (machining) to build up three-dimensional objects incrementally. This class of processes oers sophisticated design exibility with engineering materials, three-dimensional layer building, and the ability to fabricate complex engineering devices and multi-material objects. However, planning for such processes exhibits rigorous challenges due to process exibility and highly demanding planning automation. These challenges, moreover, can not be suciently tackled via common boundary representation of geometric models. In this thesis, various techniques based on the Medial Axis Transform (MAT) are presented. The medial axis transform encodes intrinsic shape characteristics into a lower dimensional metric. The MAT together with the boundary representation empowers shape manipulation and geometric reasoning. Although numerous algorithms have been proposed to recognize the MAT of polygonal objects, a robust model for arbitrarily shaped regions, especially suitable for engineering designs, is still an art of research. The approaches presented in this thesis utilize representation of the MAT in terms of clearance functions on the object boundary. The clearance functions are computed via a divide-and-conquer methodology. Three process planning problems are tackled based on the proposed MAT representation. First, an important task in planning additive/subtractive SFF is to determine whether a computed decomposition plan is feasible for manufacturing. Although decomposed layers may represent valid and manufacturable geometry, the presence of previously built layers may pose manufacturing diculty. An approach is proposed based on the 2D MAT to assist in detecting such problems. In addition, iv
surfaces that impose manufacturability problems are identied. Second, material integrity produced by solid freeform fabrication is closely related to topology and fairness of deposition paths. However, there are virtually no solutions to producing a connected and smooth spiral path that completely lls an arbitrary cross-section. We propose a shape optimization algorithm based on the medial axis transform to relax boundary constraints of cross-sectional geometry. The shape is so optimized that connected and smooth deposition paths can be generated. The resulting deposition paths are computed based on the medial axis transform. Third, cutting tool selection plays an essential role in automated planning of additive/subtractive SFF. However, it imposes rigorous computational challenges in that global shape interrogation needs to be accessed. The medial axis transform encodes global shape characteristics into readily available 1D metrics and is particularly suitable for such an application. A procedure based on histograms of shape thickness is suggested to eciently compute an optimal set of cutting tools for minimal machining time. The proposed MAT representation and planning approaches apply not only to additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication but also to various conventional manufacturing processes. The potential of utilizing such techniques for geometric reasoning and process planning is yet to be explored.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Fritz Prinz, who has provided me with a global vision of research, strong technical guidance, and valuable feedback on my research. He has given me condence in my abilities and has provided me with strong encouragement and moral support during my Ph.D. study. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Prinz. I would also like to thank other members of the doctoral thesis committee: Professors Mark Cutkosky and Kosuke Ishii for serving on my thesis reading committee, Professor Kincho Law for serving as the oral defense committee chair, and Professor Jean-Claude Latombe, Chairman of Computer Science Department, for his valuable feedback and discussions on Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis. During my rst two years of graduate study, several people have provided me with valuable technical guidance and moral support: Dr. Jyun-Ming Chen, who introduced me to Professor Fritz Prinz, has been a continuous source of advice both in technical aspects and future directions. Dr. James Hemmerle, my co-advisor during the Masters study, provided valuable technical guidance and a strong foundation of software development. Dr. Cheng-Hua Wang, who also worked in the computeraided manufacturing eld, has always been a great resource of research discussions. Dr. Raju Mattikalli, an ocemate during my masters study, has helped me with personal advice and technical guidance on numerous occasions. I would like to express sincere thanks to these individuals. Many of the research ideas developed in this thesis have been inspired by numerous discussions with Dr. Krishnan Ramaswami and Miguel Pinilla. They are very knowledgeable in the areas of solid modeling and computational geometry and have vi
given me great inspiration and suggestions on this research. Several colleagues in the Rapid Prototyping Laboratory have also helped me with many projects I participated in at Stanford. I thank all of the laboratory members for sharing their knowledge and experience with me. In particular, I would like to thank Tom Hasler, Dr. John Fessler, Dr. John Kietzman, Alexander Nickel, Alexander Cooper, Gayle Link, and Rudi Leitgeb, who have given me tremendous help when I joined the group. Sylvia Walters and Lynn Hoschek also gave me great administrative support very patiently. Many friends have also provided support and advice in my personal life. I would like to thank Te-Kan Yin, Chun-Ying Lee, Wei-Ming Chi, Sheng-I Chou, Cheng-Hsien Liu and Shelley Cheng. Last but not least, I wish to express my deep appreciation to my dear parents and parents-in-law for their continuous support and aection. I am especially indebted to my loving wife, Heidi Su, for her care and understanding, patience, encouragement, and moral support.
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Contents
Abstract Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 1.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.1 1.1.2 1.1.3 1.1.4 1.2 1.3 Solid Freeform Fabrication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Additive/Subtractive Solid Freeform Fabrication . . . . . . . . Process Planning and Geometric Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . Medial Axis Transform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv vi 1 1 2 3 5 6 7 9 12 12 22 27 28 31 31 34 38 40
Thesis Scope and Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thesis Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2 Process Planning for Additive/Subtractive SFF 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Process Planning Tasks and Requirement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Existing Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Problems and Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3 Medial Axis Transform 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Denition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overview of MAT Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Existing Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
3.5 3.6
Requirement of MAT Algorithms for Process Planning . . . . . . . . Evaluation of Existing MAT Algorithms for Process Planning . . . .
47 48 51 51 64 64 65 70 72 72 74 78 84 86 86 88 92 94 99
4 Computing Medial Axis Transforms 4.1 4.2 Preliminary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Algorithm for Smooth 2D Compact Regions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 4.2.2 4.2.3 4.2.4 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Overview of the Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Computing Individual Clearance Functions . . . . . . . . . . . Synchronizing Clearance Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Completing Clearance Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Analysis of Algorithm
Extension to Generalized Curvilinear Polygons . . . . . . . . . . . . . Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
5 Manufacturability Analysis for Decomposition 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overview of Part Decomposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manufacturability Analysis with a 2D Medial Axis Transform . . . . Manufacturability Analysis for Part Decomposition . . . . . . . . . .
Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 107
6 Path Planning for Material Deposition 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Proposed Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Deposition Paths of Prescribed Geometry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Shape Optimization for Optimal Deposition Paths . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Discussion and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
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7 Automated Cutting Tool Selection 7.1 7.2 7.3
126
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Tool Selection for Bulk Material Removal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 7.3.1 7.3.2 Continuous Analytical Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Discrete Histogram Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7
Tool Selection for Machining Near Net Deposits . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Tool Selection for Finish Machining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Discussion and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 145
8 Conclusions 8.1 8.2
Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 151 153
A Conversion from MAT to Boundary Representation Bibliography
List of Tables
6.1 Formulas and examples of the constant-osetting and adaptive-osetting approaches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
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List of Figures
1.1 1.2 Process cycle of a typical additive SFF process. . . . . . . . . . . . . Process cycle of a typical additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Process planning steps in additive/subtractive SFF. . . . . . . . . . . Axiom of part decomposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 14 18 18 21 22 23 33 35 38 52 53 55 57 59 60 62 3
Denition of compacts in additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication. 15 Build direction and its eects on process plans. . . . . . . . . . . . . An intermediate result of material deposition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . An intermediate result of subtractive operations. . . . . . . . . . . . . A completed injection molding insert and its features. . . . . . . . . . Illustration of medial axis transform denition in two dimensions. . . Mapping from a boundary point to the center of its medial axis ball. . Strong deformation retract of a rectangular region. . . . . . . . . . . Projection of boundary points onto the medial axis. . . . . . . . . . . Clearance function on the boundary of the region. . . . . . . . . . . . Bisecting point and bisecting distance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bisecting functions for an example 2D region. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bisecting functions and the clearance function. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clearance function as inmum of bisecting functions. . . . . . . . . . Visualization of the clearance function for an example 2D region. . . .
Part decomposition and a build sequence for an injection molding insert. 19
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4.8 4.9
Visualization of the clearance function for a 3D object. . . . . . . . . Initializing the merged clearance function. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
63 69 70 79 80 81 82 83 90 91 91 92 96 97 98
4.10 Tracing the clearance function.
4.11 Extension of the proposed approach to generalized curvilinear polygons. 76 4.12 Computation of the clearance function for a rectangular region. . . . 4.13 Visualization of clearance function on a rectangular region. . . . . . . 4.14 Computation of the clearance function for a smooth curved region. . . 4.15 Clearance functions for a smooth region with holes. . . . . . . . . . . 4.16 The clearance functions and medial axes for a 2D domain with curvilinear boundaries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 A simple turning wheel assembly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A compact decomposition solution to the turning wheel assembly. . . Two possible build sequences of a simple turning wheel mechanism. . Manufacturability of two build sequences of a simple turning wheel mechanism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A non-r -sweepable region. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Computing inaccessible boundaries of a region. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Computing the inaccessible wedges for manufacturability analysis. . . Manufacturability analysis procedures for constructing a turning wheel assembly with additive/subtractive SFF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 A decomposition example and its manufacturability. . . . . . . . . . . 104 5.10 A link component and its manufacturability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 5.11 An injection molding insert and its manufacturability. . . . . . . . . . 105 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 Common deposition patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Problems produced by recursively osetting algorithms. . . . . . . . . 109 Proposed deposition path planning methodology. . . . . . . . . . . . 111 An example of a simple MAT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Shape optimization for optimal deposition paths. . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Optimal deposition path planning for a shape with contraction features.122 Optimal deposition path planning for a curved layer geometry. . . . . 123 xiii
7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7
Generalized trapezoids for a 2D object. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 r -accessible trapezoids. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 R-accessible trapezoid and its relation with tool paths. . . . . . . . . 133 Eective clearance histogram and the accumulated clearance histogram.136 Eective and accumulated clearance histograms for the sample geometry.141 The results of tool selection for bulk material removal of the sample geometry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Tool selection for machining near-net deposits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
A.1 Boundary curve approximation between two adjacent MAT disks at s and s + ds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
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Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background
In todays competitive industry, manufacturing engineers are eagerly seeking ways to deliver increasingly complex products in a timely and cost-eective manner. Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF), also known as layered manufacturing, seems to warrant their attention by creating physical objects automatically from mathematical models in a layer-by-layer fashion. Nevertheless, the price paid for such automation is reduced part accuracy, surface quality, and material integrity. Additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication aims at improving these eects by integrating layered manufacturing techniques with conventional subtractive operations such as machining. This class of processes oers sophisticated design exibility with engineering materials and the ability to fabricate intricate engineering devices. However, process planning for such processes exhibits rigorous challenges due to process exibility and demanding planning automation. An essential part of process planning in additive/subtractive SFF involves reasoning about product geometry to generate product-specic manufacturing plans. A common model to describe product geometry is based on its boundary. Such a boundary representation describes objects by their boundaries, and has been shown insucient for geometric reasoning without further extensive computation. The Medial Axis Transform (MAT), on the other hand, encodes intrinsic shape 1
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
characteristics based on the object interior. It oers complete information for geometric reasoning when used in conjunction with boundary representation. This powerful representation, however, has not yet received full utilization, due in part to diculty of MAT computation in engineering domains. It is the goal of this thesis to provide a solution for computing MATs of 2D curved objects and to utilize the MAT techniques for various process planning tasks in additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication. The following provides a detailed background on these subjects.
1.1.1
Solid Freeform Fabrication
Solid freeform fabrication (SFF) is a set of manufacturing processes that produce complex solid objects directly from geometric models without specic part or tooling information. A subset of such processes is layered manufacturing, also referred to as additive solid freeform fabrication (Figure 1.1). SFF builds up 3D objects by successive 2D layer deposition; objects are sliced into 2D thin layers, and each layer is built by various deposition or forming processes. Deposition methods may include solidication of liquid resins with ultraviolet radiation (Stereolithography, SLA), sintering of powders with laser scans (Selective Laser Sintering, SLS), and extrusion of heated thermoplastic polymers (Fused Deposition Modeling, FDM). Subsequent layers are then deposited and bonded onto the previous layers until the nal approximated 2 1/2 D objects are constructed. This additive SFF technique exhibits several advantages over traditional manufacturing methods. First, complex objects can be easily built; 3D objects are decomposed into 2D layers, and planning on 2D domain is relatively simple. Second, no custom xtures are required; traditional machining operations demand sophisticated xturing techniques for complex objects. Third, build time is greatly reduced; parts are often completed within a few hours up to a couple of days, in contrast to conventional processes that may take few weeks, months, or longer. However, several disadvantages can also be observed due to the nature of layered
Iterative layer deposition
Finished part (after support structures removed)
Figure 1.1: Process cycle of a typical additive SFF process. processing. First, the surface nish of completed parts is poor; parts exhibit wellknown stair-step eects along the build direction. In addition, the shrinkage factor for the chosen material has to be considered during planning. Second, material choice is limited; candidate materials should ensure geometric preservation as well as adequate bonding between adjacent layers. Materials, along with deposition methods, should also guarantee the required part resolution. Finally, material integrity is hard to achieve for engineering applications; constraints on material selection and geometric preservation prohibit parts built with common engineering materials. In addition, intrinsic behavior of such fabrication methods makes materials anisotropic along the build direction. Applications of additive SFF processes are often limited to look-andfeel prototypes, form-tting for assembly tests, or as an intermediate means for other manufacturing processes such as patterns for investment casting.
1.1.2
Additive/Subtractive Solid Freeform Fabrication
Additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication (Figure 1.2) aims at improving geometric accuracy of parts produced from purely additive SFF processes. This class of manufacturing processes comprises iterative material deposition and removal. Parts are rst decomposed into simpler, smaller, and manufacturable 3D building blocks; each building block is then iteratively built and shaped. Common additive/subtractive SFF processes include Laminated Object Manufacturing (LOM) shaping outlines of each thin layer, Lasercaving cutting cavities with laser layer-by-layer, and Shape
additive procedure (deposition)
subtractive procedure (shaping)
finished part (after support structures removed)
Figure 1.2: Process cycle of a typical additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication process. Deposition Manufacturing (SDM) [40] machining surfaces of decomposed threedimensional entities. Many other research institutes are also investigating approaches to integrating contour shaping into their layered manufacturing processes in the hope of expanding material applicability while achieving required geometric accuracy. This class of processes exhibits several advantages. First, it produces better accuracy than purely additive SFF due to introduction of intermediate material removal procedures. Second, materials and deposition methods are not constrained by resolution of deposition, since accuracy of parts is controlled by shaping processes. For instance, materials can be cast, fused, welded, or even pre-fabricated. Third, no custom xturing is required. Fixtures are inherent in additive/subtractive SFF; support structures and all previously built layers automatically serve as xtures for the subsequent layers. Finally, additive/subtractive SFF opens up the engineering design space. Parts can be embedded with pre-fabricated components such as electronic devices or sensors. In addition, it is capable of constructing internal intricate features as well as integrated assembly mechanisms.
However, such process exibility brings in complexity and diculty in automating process planning. For example, in additive/subtractive SFF, we often decompose parts into three-dimensional solid layers, as opposed to two-dimensional thin slices. Furthermore, intermediate shaping operations present non-trivial planning tasks, compared with purely additive SFF; specic geometry information of parts needs to be evaluated for selecting appropriate tools to shape the layer surfaces. Such process planning tasks must require minimum human intervention, if not full automation, to make additive/subtractive SFF a reliable and attractive production technique.
1.1.3
Process Planning and Geometric Reasoning
Basic constituents in process planning of additive/subtractive SFF include computation of the build orientations, decomposition of the input 3D objects into smaller and manufacturable entities, planning of deposition operations, and machining instruction generation. The input to such process planning includes part geometry, material, process information, and other production requirements. These resources can not be independently considered during process planning. However, it is of particular interest in this thesis to study how part geometry inuences the resulting manufacturing plans. For instance, surface normals and their relations with the build orientation aect complexity of machining operations as well as part decomposition. The smoothness of the part boundary dictates the topology and quality of the deposition path. The thinness of part features determines the proper build sequences to ensure that thin features can be constructed without causing shaping diculties. Curvature of surfaces and clearance between features inuence machining parameters such as tool sizes. Dimension of parts and their shape distribution aect total build time and amount of support structures required. Both local and global geometric properties need to be accessed to evaluate feasible manufacturing plans as well as to determine a costeective solution within many alternatives. A common mathematical model for dening part geometry is based on boundary
representation. This representation describes an object by its enclosing boundaries (e.g., surfaces of 3D objects). It provides readily available information on local geometric properties such as normal directions, curvatures, and tangency of a point on these entities. However, global geometric properties such as proximity between features or thickness of a specic region in the part are not directly available without further extensive computation. This makes boundary representation inadequate for interrogating part geometry and for supporting a completely automated process planner.
1.1.4
Medial Axis Transform
The medial axis transform is a representation that encodes an object with symmetric (medial) axes in the object interior. This transformation labels each point on the medial axes with a metric of the dimension of the local region. One can reconstruct the object by sweeping a scalable ball along the medial axis with its radius equal to the dimensional metric recorded on the medial axis point. Such a representation provides knowledge of object interior. Thickness of a local region corresponds to the dimensional metrics recorded on the medial axis. The clearance in the exterior of an object can be captured by computing the medial axis transform of the negative volume. The distribution of shape dimensions can be analyzed from the medial axes and the associated dimensional metrics. In addition, the medial axes obtained from the medial axis transform can be utilized for shape recognition due to its reduced dimension and enhanced representation simplicity. However, the medial axis transform in its raw form is not capable of providing solutions to local geometric properties of surfaces. Therefore, we require a hybrid representation based on medial axis transform and boundary representation to record both local and global geometric information of an object.
1.2
Thesis Scope and Problem Statement
The goal of this thesis is to develop a generic approach for representing and computing MAT of arbitrarily shaped objects, and to utilize the MAT techniques for various process planning tasks in additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication. More specifically, this thesis covers the following issues:
MAT Computation of Arbitrarily Shaped 2D Objects:

Algorithms to computing the medial axis transform for an arbitrarily shaped 3D object have been studied for many years and yet present numerous diculties in doing so robustly. Due to expensive computation involved in computing MAT for freeform solids, many algorithms tend to operate in tessellated domain. However, articial medial axis branches often appear as a result of discretization due to sensitivity of medial axis transform to boundary smoothness. An alternative solution to this problem is to construct MAT in a 2 1/2 D manner. Such a solution is particularly suitable in planning additive/subtractive SFF since the processes are inherently dependent on a xed build orientation. It is computationally economic to compute MATs of many sliced 2D regions as opposed to that of a full 3D solid, if the sliced 2D MAT can provide adequate interrogation information. Many 2D MAT approaches have been proposed. However, few of them deal with arbitrarily shaped 2D regions eciently. In addition, their primary concern is on the conversion of 2D geometry to the medial axis transform, which alone is inadequate for various geometric reasoning tasks encountered in process planning, as discussed in the previous sections. Our goal is to present a new paradigm of describing medial axis transform with its boundary representation. These two representations must be coupled so that answers to various geometric interrogation should be readily available without further extensive computation. We also propose a solution to computing 2D MAT based on this paradigm and show that such a solution exhibits advantages over many existing approaches.
Manufacturability Analysis for Part Decomposition:

The rst step in process planning is to verify whether a submitted design is manufacturable within capacity of manufacturing facility. Such computation should be eciently performed without needing to generate all the manufacturing plans. In additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication, 3D solids are decomposed into a number of manufacturable entities, each of which is built incrementally. This is in hope to resolve various manufacturability problems imposed by process constraints by a means of decomposition. Therefore, manufacturability analysis could not be conveyed without knowledge of decomposition behavior. To assess manufacturability of a particular decomposition solution, we need to evaluate geometry of the layer to be built and its relation with the built geometry. Various process and material constraints could prevent the parts from being built in compliance with the desired quality. The issues include: casting of viscous materials into small thin cavities, deposition of materials into internal sharp corners, machining of narrow regions, and building a thin tall entity. Of these problems, we shall demonstrate how the proposed 2 1/2 D paradigm can be utilized to ensure that each decomposed entity can be shaped properly with available cutting tools.
Path Planning for Material Deposition:

Once a solid is decomposed to a set of feasible entities, the next step is to generate material deposition paths. Various deposition methods can be invoked, including regionbased approaches such as casting and adhering, or point-to-point based methods such as welding, fusing and extrusion. Among these deposition approaches, point-to-point processes require careful planning of deposition paths in that deposition conguration can greatly aect material integrity. Point-to-point deposition is usually performed in 2D fashion. The corresponding deposition path, used to ll a 2D region with its 1D trajectory, often includes raster and spiral patterns. Of these two patterns, spiral paths appear to result in more uniform thermal stress distribution across a 2D region. Common methods for generating spiral paths rely on recursive oset of boundary
curves on a 2D deposition region. Such methods exhibit inherent drawbacks since gaps may exist if step-over distances are not properly chosen. Materials can be deposited non-uniformly in extrusion-based deposition. To minimize these problems, we propose a new path generation algorithm based on the medial axis transform.
Automated Cutting Tool Selection:

Once material is deposited to form a near-net shape of decomposed entities, material removal processes are involved to accurately shape their surfaces. Various shaping methods can be applied to accomplish this task, including 2D laser cutting, 2D contour machining or cutting, 3D surface machining, and electrical discharge machining. Of these processes, laser cutting only separates the part and waste materials, and it is considered dicult to achieve fully automated cleanup or shaping procedures. Machining, on the other hand, is a more feasible and reliable means to eciently remove waste materials and to accurately shape freeform surfaces. A challenging task in planning machining operations is to determine the sizes of cutting tools. Selection of this parameter often requires skillful human intervention due to diculty in automated geometric reasoning. We suggest an optimization scheme based on the proposed medial axis representation to compute an ecient set of cutting tools with minimal machining time.
1.3
Thesis Outline
The rest of this thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 2 outlines general process planning tasks involved in additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication (SFF). The content of each process planning task is identied and existing planning approaches are reviewed. Current challenges faced in implementing an automated process planner are also presented in this chapter. Chapter 3 and chapter 4 focus on representation and algorithms of medial axis transform.
10
Chapter 3 reviews the denition and basic properties of medial axis transform. Existing applications of MAT and its potential usage for mechanical design and manufacturing are discussed. Algorithms for computing MAT of 2D and 3D objects are summarized. In order for MAT to support various planning tasks of additive/subtractive SFF, the MAT representation and algorithms are evaluated against various planning requirement. This chapter shows that a coupled model based on MAT and boundary representation is needed to accomplish automated planning. Such a model is introduced in chapter 4. Chapter 4 proposes a new representation of the medial axis transform using clearance functions. A method that utilizes such a representation to compute MATs of arbitrarily shaped 2D objects is presented. Such an approach is shown to exhibit several advantages over existing methods. This algorithm can also be generalized to curvilinear polygons consisting of circular arcs and linear segments. Chapters 5 to 7 investigate approaches based on the proposed clearance function representation to facilitate various process planning tasks in additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication. Chapter 5 focuses on manufacturability analysis for 3D part decomposition. An overview of available part decomposition strategies is provided. It is shown that even though parts may be decomposed correctly with respect to the build direction, they may not present a feasible manufacturing plan due to various manufacturing constraints. A 2D manufacturability tool based on the suggested clearance function model is proposed to identify a feasible 3D decomposition that permits cutting tool access throughout the fabrication. Chapter 6 describes a method of generating high-quality deposition paths. The problems in generating spiral paths for depositing materials are rst summarized. An approach is proposed to improve the quality of deposition paths by relaxing shapes of deposition regions. A formula is then presented to generate smooth and connected spiral paths directly from the optimized medial axis transform. Chapter 7 proposes a new approach to automated selection of cutting tools that achieve minimal machining time. Two optimization models to accomplish this task are described: one is a continuous analytical model based on the proposed clearance
11
function representation, the other is a discrete histogram model encoded from the continuous representation. These models are utilized to select an ecient set of cutters for removing bulk materials, for shaping near-net deposition, and for nish machining. Chapter 8 concludes this thesis and summarizes contributions of the work presented in this thesis. Several potential applications that could benet from the proposed representation and algorithms are described.
Chapter 2 Process Planning for Additive/Subtractive SFF

This chapter outlines general process planning tasks involved in additive/ subtractive solid freeform fabrication (SFF). The content of each planning task is identied and existing planning approaches are reviewed. Current challenges faced in implementing an automated process planner are presented in this chapter.
2.1
Process Planning Tasks and Requirement
Process planning of additive/subtractive SFF takes full 3D geometric models as input and outputs a process description that species contents and sequences of operations necessary for producing the given parts. The contents contain machineunderstandable codes for driving designated machines to perform desired operations, whereas sequences specify orders of operations that are valid to manufacture the given parts. The goal of an automated process planner is not only to generate various manufacturing instructions, but also to reduce cost of fabrication, to enhance quality in terms of lead time and throughput, to improve product quality, and to utilize various manufacturing resources in a cost-eective manner. Requirements and content of each planning step are presented in this section and existing approaches and challenges to 12
CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 13
achieve such planning automation are described in the following sections. Planning of additive/subtractive SFF processes entails the following tasks: Determining the build orientation Decomposing a 3D object into simpler manufacturable 3D entities Planning material addition operations Planning material removal operations Planning post-processes The rst two steps are related to characteristics of solid freeform fabrication, in which the build direction and layer geometry must be pre-determined; the next two steps, planning for detail material addition and removal operations, generally include tasks such as Selecting material addition/removal methods Sequencing operations Selecting tools or xtures Computing operation parameters Generating NC programs Determining setup requirements Planning auxiliary steps The last step, post-processing, involves operations such as removing parts from xtures, etching out sacricial materials, removing intermediate processing features such as sprues or runners, etc. A schematic framework that depicts these planning steps is shown in Fig 2.1. The following sub-sections rst outline the denition of a compact a building block in additive/subtractive SFF processes, and then detail the content of each planning task.
CAD model
(e.g., for minimal build time, Determine Build Orientation minimal volume of support structure required)
Oriented model
Decompose
(e.g., to resolve geometric constraints and process constraints)
A list of decomposed models (e.g., to select machines and tools, to compute operation parameters and NC instructions, to specify required auxiliary procedures)
for each decomposed model
Plan Deposition
Plan Machining
Manufacturing Plans
Figure 2.1: Process planning steps in additive/subtractive SFF.
build direction
a valid compact
an invalid compact
Figure 2.2: Denition of compacts in additive/subtractive SFF. The left gure represents a valid compact since all rays cast along the build direction intersect the geometry at most once. The geometry on the right is not a valid compact since some vertical rays intersect it twice.
Compact
Additive/subtractive SFF processes involve iterative material deposition, shaping and other secondary operations. Each of these operations is associated with a part component or a decomposed geometry (i.e., a compact in [39]), which together represent a nal product. The characteristics of such decomposed geometry (i.e., a set of compacts) are that all supports for its undercut features must be previously built, and no interference should occur in depositing or shaping processes from the top with respect to the build direction. In other words, any ray cast along the build direction should not intersect a compact geometry more than once (see Figure 2.2). Operations associated with each compact may include deposition with dierent types of material or machines, machining operations using CNC machines, or electrical discharge machining. Or it could be simple operations such as automatic insertion of pre-fabricated components. The following describes issues related to automatic and optimal planning for additive/subtractive processes.
Determining Build Direction

Build directions greatly aect subsequent process plans and material integrity. Factors to be considered to achieve lower-cost, better-quality parts include
Build time: Dierent build orientations result in dierent operation sequences, which in turn aects the total build time. In general, an orientation with lower overall height along the build direction requires less time to complete the parts since material often takes more time to be cured or solidied before subsequence machining operations can be applied. Number of compacts: A relatively large number of compacts as a result of decomposition increases the build time. In addition, material bonding between layers is often worse than the intra-layer bonding. A large number of compacts may increase the defects and decrease the surface quality along layer boundaries. Volume of support structures: Surfaces facing downward are usually formed by constructing a support structure, and then casting the part material on the support materials. The volume of support structures required aects the overall build time as well as number of layers. Surface nish: Downward-facing surfaces usually have worse surface nish compared with the directly-machined surfaces. As a common practice, we would like to choose a build direction so that the areas of downward-facing surfaces can be minimized. Material integrity: Some parts are preferred to be built along a specic direction, such as for material strength consideration. Such a factor has to be taken into account.
Part Decomposition
Once a build orientation is determined, a part is decomposed to a set of manufacturable compacts subject to the following constraints: Process constraints: Some processes may impose an additional constraint on the envelope or shape of a compact. For instance, the size of a compact along the build direction should not exceed the length of the cutter to be used for
machining the contour of the compact. Or the depth of a compact may not exceed the curing depth in case post-curing is required. Furthermore, the size of a compact may relate to quality of material deposition, which should be also taken into account. Geometric constraints: As dened previously, a compact is a geometric entity such that no ray shooting along the build direction should penetrate more than once. In addition, in order for a compact to be manufacturable, we ought to consider these additional constraints: rst, material addition must enable access from above with respect to the build direction. Second, the upward-facing surfaces or counterparts of downward-facing surfaces need to be accessible by a given material removal tool. A by-product to this part decomposition is often the creation of support structures. Individual compacts are ensured manufacturable only if they are supported by previously built objects. These supporting objects could be previously-built part compacts or temporary support structures made of sacricial materials to be removed upon completion of the object. When there exists any overhang feature in the part, a support structure needs to be built prior to building this feature. The output of this decomposition step is a set of geometric entities that are manufacturable with the participated material addition and removal processes. Figure 2.3 shows the axiom of part decomposition. Figure 2.4 demonstrates how the build direction may aect the decomposition results. Figure 2.5 illustrates a solution to part decomposition and the part build sequence for an injection molding insert with internal cooling channels and a copper deposit [19, 28].
Planning for Material Addition

Material is usually deposited in consecutive 2D layers until a near-net shape of a compact is built. In additive/subtractive SFF processes, deposition may not need to
Upward-facing surfaces
Downward-facing surfaces
111111111 000000000 000000000 111111111

: part material
0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111
support material 11 : 00 00 : subtrate 11
1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000
Figure 2.3: Axiom of part decomposition. Volume below upward-facing surfaces can be constructed directly, whereas volume above downward facing surfaces must have their support structures built.
2. 2a. 1. (a) : part material : support material
3. 2b. 1. (b)
Figure 2.4: Build direction and its eects on process plans. The left gure shows the part to be built. The gure (a) represents a possible build orientation, which results in two build steps but may create machining diculty at the top notch. Figure (b) shows another build orientation, which requires three build steps but the total build height is smaller.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Figure 2.5: Part decomposition and a build sequence for an injection molding insert built in Rapid Prototyping Laboratory at Stanford University. Step (1) completes the bottom portion of the insert, where the cavity for the copper deposit has been shaped and the cooling channels are lled with a sacricial material. Step (2) incrementally builds the middle section of the insert. Step (3) nishes the copper deposit. The nal step completes the insert. Note that the actual build steps involve more operations and more sophisticated sequencing to improve the part quality and surface nish.
be net-shaped since intermediate material removal processes remove excess materials to accurately shape the geometry. Major planning steps include: Selecting a material addition method: Various deposition methods exist. Selection of the method depends on material types and desired characteristics of parts. Sequencing operations: Deposition is performed layer by layer from bottom to top. Computing operation parameters: The step-over distance between deposition passes depends on deposition methods and materials deposited. Generating NC programs: This involves generating machine-understandable instructions to drive the deposition head to move across a 2D region. Determining setup requirements: The part has to be transferred to a predetermined location for accurate and consistent part fabrication. Planning auxiliary steps: This includes any post-processing such as cooling, UV curing, pre-heating, etc. Figure 2.6 shows an example of material deposition in progress. Materials can be deposited in near-net shape and later be accurately machined by material shaping operations.
Planning for Material Removal

In additive/subtractive SFF processes, there exist no tool interference problems since any supports for undercut features have been built in earlier stages, and parts can be further decomposed according to machining constraints. Therefore, planning for machining operations need not consider interference problems. In additive/subtractive processes, automatic machining path generation is crucial due to the number of machining operations involved. The tasks include
Figure 2.6: An intermediate result of material deposition. An injection molding insert is being built as shown in this gure. It is at a stage after material is deposited in near-net shape and before a shaping process is invoked. Selecting material removal methods: CNC machining and electrical discharge machining (EDM) are two of the most common methods. Sequencing operations: Machining often involves various operations such as pocket machining, peripheral milling, or sculpture surface machining. Selecting tools or xtures: In additive/subtractive SFF, xtures are the previously built materials. Appropriate tools need to be selected or fabricated (in case of EDM) that accommodate part geometry. Computing operation parameters: Machining parameters such as feed-rates, spindle speeds, depth of cut, step-over distances are determined by materials, machining methods, and cutting conditions. Generating NC programs: This refers to G-codes that should completely remove excess materials. Determining setup requirements: Since no custom xtures are required, this usually refers to positioning of parts. Planning auxiliary steps: These may include pallet transfer, cleaning, and tool changes.
Figure 2.7: An intermediate result of subtractive operations. An injection molding insert is shaped with 2 1/2 D machining. This insert is to be further processed by electrical discharge machining for more accurate nish. Figure 2.7 shows an example of material removal and shaping. Various material removal processes can be involved to nish a part. Figure 2.8 shows a completed injection molding insert (the counterpart of the one shown in Figure 2.7) and its features.
2.2
Existing Approaches
Process planning techniques for additive solid freeform fabrication have been widely studied and applied in daily operations. However, due to the inherent diculty, many issues still need to be resolved to fully deliver the promise of planning automation for additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication. This section reviews some of the planning techniques that are applicable to both additive and additive/subtractive SFF processes. In addition, new approaches proposed for planning additive/subtractive SFF are discussed.
Copper deposit
cooling channels
Figure 2.8: (Top): An injection molding insert with internal cooling channels and embedded copper deposits. (Bottom): A transparent view of the embedded copper deposit and cooling channels. The core of this insert is made of INVAR whereas the shell is stainless steel.
Determine Build Orientation

The build orientation can be determined by solving a non-linear optimization problem. The free variable of this optimization problem is the build direction and the objectives are usually minimal build time, minimal amount of support structures, good surface nish, better part strength, etc. [38] The build-time objective function can be approximated by number of layers or heights of objects along a given build direction; amount of support structures can be estimated by computing surface areas requiring supports (i.e., those with downwardfacing normals); surface nish can be evaluated according to angles between surface normals and the build direction; material strength may be predicted by nite element analysis. In additive-subtractive solid freeform fabrication, additional criteria need to be considered. For example, downward-facing surfaces usually produce a rougher surface nish when support structures are removed. The total area of such surfaces is to be minimized. Furthermore, the number of transitions from downward-facing to upwardfacing surfaces aects the number of material addition/removal cycles. This transition corresponds to existence of silhouette edges on the surfaces. Recently, Gupta [23] proposed an approach that maps surface normals to a unit sphere and determines the orientation that results in the minimum number of downward / upward-facing surface transitions directly from the mapped unit sphere. This approach reduces the overhead of computing silhouette edges numerically for each evaluated build direction.
Part decomposition
In additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication, an object is decomposed into arbitrarily shaped 3D compacts. This is in contrast to additive SFF, where a 3D object is sliced into planar 2D layers. Slicing an object into 2D layers often takes advantages of the facetted representation and results in very ecient computation. For 3D part decomposition, Ramaswami et al. [54] proposed an approach based
on silhouette curves. They rst identify the silhouette edges along a given build direction. A collection of these silhouette edges together with existing edges form a loop, which is used to split the surfaces. Part models are then decomposed and support structures are generated with the help of several extrusion operations. The results of decomposition can be structured in an adjacency graph [49, 50] where nodes represent each compact geometry or other pre-fabricated components to be inserted; edges represent the adjacency relationship between connected nodes. A directed graph that represents the precedence relationship among compacts can then be extracted from the adjacency graph. With the precedence graph, a set of alternative build plans can be computed. Each plan represents a possible build sequence on the decomposed geometry, and these plans can be chosen optimally depending upon machine availability or other criteria such as build time and surface nish, etc. These build alternatives can then be transferred to job shops for run-time scheduling.

Material addition methods are determined by the types of materials and desired characteristics of parts. Once a deposition method is chosen, the associated setup procedures and required auxiliary steps can be retrieved from the database. The deposition height per layer as well as feed-rate of deposition is usually obtained from the experimental data. Common patterns for generating deposition paths are raster patterns (or zig-zag patterns) paths are parallel to a given direction, and spiral patterns (or contourparallel patterns) paths are parallel to contours of geometry. These two patterns, or directions for raster patterns can be alternated [27] to minimize warpage as a result of incremental deposition.

A material removal process usually involves automated CNC machining to accurately shape the material geometry. Several types of machining operations are available for various features of the parts. For instance, one could use at-end milling to create pockets or slots, face milling to create at surfaces, ball-end milling to create sculptured surfaces, and side milling to prole contours. Feature recognition techniques have been widely used to identify these machining features [57]. However, in additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication, the amount of excess materials to be removed is relatively small and features on the original parts may have been decomposed. As a result, the material removal process can be considered to be featurefree. Ramaswami [53] outlined the procedures for CNC machining in the Shape Deposition Manufacturing process. Rough machining is used to create near-net shape of a compact; prole cutting or nishing cutting is then employed to accurately shape the layer. The types of operations depend only on surface properties such as convexity, concavity or atness. Therefore, no sophisticated feature recognition process is required. Tool selection is often solved by an optimization procedure, where the free variable is the tool size and the objective is usually to minimize total machining time. Evaluation of the objective function requires generating tool paths and computing the resulting machining time. Machining parameters such as depth of cut, pass spacing (step-over distance), are often given by users. The appropriateness of the parameters is unknown until paths are computed. Tool paths for contour proling are often generated by osetting the boundary curves; paths for surface machining often follow given patterns such as raster patterns, spiral patterns, or parameter-line patterns. By shooting a ray along a given direction and projecting such a ray onto a surface, raster-pattern paths can be produced. For spiral-pattern paths, one could project the boundary of a surface onto a 2D plane, generate spiral paths on this plane and map them back to the original surface.
Parameter-line patterns can be easily created by following the constant-parameter curves.
2.3
Problems and Challenges
Part decomposition
Although Ramaswamis approach [54] gives a feasible solution to decomposition, the produced compacts may consist of small features or narrow cavities. These increase diculty in machining and may require more expensive and time-consuming processes, for examples, electrical discharge machining. Binnard [5] utilizes a set of pre-dened library elements to facilitate part decomposition and to generate associated manufacturing plans. However, when features interact, they need to be merged or split to resolve additional geometric constraints due to feature interaction. Consequently, small or sharp features in the decomposed objects may also appear. A key issue to such part decomposition is manufacturability analysis of decomposed objects. Since solutions to part decomposition are not unique, such evaluation can help determine a good, if not optimal, decomposition result. Furthermore, when no part decomposition strategies exist to build a complex design with available manufacturing resources, the process planner should report where the problems occur and suggest possible design modication before actually generating all manufacturing plans.

The spiral path pattern has been widely used in CNC machining for machining pockets. However, the same strategy may not be directly applicable to material deposition due to sensitivity of material integrity to conguration of deposition paths. A common approach to generating the spiral paths is via recursive osetting. It has been shown that such an approach may result in incomplete lling and that paths
generated may be disconnected or contain sharp corners. As a result, voids may exist and materials can be deposited non-uniformly. However, congurations of paths are often constrained by geometry of deposition regions. It is a challenging task to create a smooth and complete path for any arbitrarily shaped 2D deposition regions.

A main challenge of planning a machining operation is to evaluate whether an object can be correctly shaped with a given process. This is often achieved by generateand-test approaches, where a feasible process plan is generated and the result is then compared with the input to evaluate the performance of the generated plan. However, this generate-and-test process can be very time consuming. It also does not guarantee a successful enumeration of all possible plans. One of the most critical manufacturing parameters is the tool size and tool geometry. A question often arises as to what an appropriate tool size should be for an ecient cutting. One safe but inecient approach is to enumerate all possible tools and determine the best possible outcome. This ineciency is even exaggerated in the planning of additive-subtractive solid freeform fabrication, where machining operations are frequently involved. Moreover, step-over distances between adjacent passes are signicant to both completeness and eciency of machining. Common CAD/CAM systems often require users to provide such an input. The challenges for users are to reason about the machined geometry and to provide an appropriate guess. Therefore, many parameters usually are determined by skillful human intervention.
2.4
Discussion and Conclusion
In this chapter, the process planning tasks involved in additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication (SFF) are outlined. These include determining build orientations, decomposing 3D objects into sub-entities, and planning material deposition
and removal operations. Currently the process planning demands considerable human intervention. It is our goal to facilitate, if not be able to fully automate, the process planning of additive/subtractive SFF. Part decomposition is a challenging task in such process planning. Due to its combinatorial nature, it is impractical to explore all decomposition plans. Furthermore, it is also unwise to examine only one single solution, for many manufacturing constraints could render such a plan infeasible. To achieve automated computation of feasible part decomposition, manufacturability analysis must be employed to assist identifying a feasible result. However, common manufacturability analysis tools rely heavily on feature extraction and the generate-and-test methodology. Such approaches further compound the complexity of problems. There is a need to use a simple and powerful representation to facilitate manufacturability analysis for part decomposition. Material deposition is generally performed in a 2D fashion. Although path generation has been developed for conventional machining, it is not directly applicable to material deposition due to sensitivity of resultant material integrity to topology and geometry of the deposition path. In additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication, material need not be deposited to its net shape (due to introduction of shaping operations). Such exibility allows deposition geometry to be relaxed to accommodate a desired path conguration. To facilitate computation of a relaxed shape for achieving desired path characteristics, a representation is needed that could inherently couple geometry of the deposition region with its deposition path. Machining planning has been studied for more than three decades. Attributed to advanced computer technology, the success allows tool paths to be generated, simulated, and veried within a short period of computation time. Such an advance, however, is not yet considered satisfactory, as human intervention is often required to identify machining strategies and to assign necessary machining parameters such as cutting tools. Selection of cutting tools demands spatial reasoning of machining regions. It presents rigorous challenges as parts become more complex. To achieve automation of cutting tool selection, a geometric representation that enables fast spatial interrogation is needed.
This thesis investigates the medial axis transform (MAT) representation, and presents several approaches based on MAT to accomplish numerous challenging planning tasks for additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication.
Chapter 3 Medial Axis Transform

3.1 Denition
The Medial Axis Transform (MAT) was rst proposed by Blum [6] to describe shapes for biological problems. He dened the medial axis as loci of centers of locally maximal balls inside an object. In two dimensions, it would be the loci of centers of locally maximal disks inside the region. A ball or disk is locally maximal if there exist no other balls or disks that contain it. The points on the medial axis are called medial axis points. These medial axis points together with the radii of the associated locally maximal balls denes the medial axis transform of an object. Let Ball(x, r ) denote a set of points in Rn that are r R distance or less from the point x Rn . In other words, Ball(x, r ) = {p | distance(p, x) r, p Rn }. We have the following denition for the medial axis transform: Denition 3.1 (Medial Axis Transform) Let A be a subset of Rn , x Rn be a point in A. The Medial Axis Transform of A, MAT(A), is a subset of Rn+1 consisting of the closure of points (x, rx ), rx R such that the ball centered at x with radius rx is locally maximal in A. The set of x is the medial axis MA(A). In other words, MAT(A) is a set of (x, rx ), where x A and rx R, such that (Figure 3.1) 31
CHAPTER 3. MEDIAL AXIS TRANSFORM
32
1. (x, rx ) MAT(A) = Ball(x, rx ) A 2. (x1 , rx1 ), (x2 , rx2 ) MAT(A) = Ball(x1 , rx1 ) Ball(x2 , rx2 )
The balls that satisfy the above conditions are called medial axis balls.
According to the above denition, the medial axis points are equidistant to object boundary. They represent a trajectory of the innermost interior points. In two dimensions, these medial axis points represent a set of continuous 1D entities. The points where three or more entities meet are called branch points. In three dimensions, medial axis points form a set of continuous 1D or 2D entities. The latter are usually referred as medial surfaces. The edges where more than two medial surfaces meet are called seams [60, 9]. Existence of branch points or seams suggests non-manifold topology of medial axes. Each medial axis point is encoded with the radius of the associated medial axis ball. This radius value represents the distance from a medial axis point to its nearest boundary points, or equivalently, to where the medial axis ball touches the boundary. A continuous mapping from medial axis points to their associated radii, or distances to boundary, denes the radius function of medial axis transform. Magnitudes of the radius function depict the thickness of a region in the neighborhood of the medial axis points. It also captures sharp corners of a boundary, where the radius function value approaches to zero. Furthermore, the prole of the radius function could indicate certain geometric characteristics such as contraction and symmetry. Medial axis balls must be tangent to the associated boundary points since a medial axis ball is locally maximal. On the other hand, at any boundary point, a medial axis ball can be constructed by growing a ball toward the interior until the ball strikes the boundary at any other points. The medial axis is sensitive to boundary geometry. A small notch appearing on the contour introduces a branch of medial axis extending to it. Moreover, the medial axis transform of a convex polygon has branches reaching all corners of the polygon. For detailed analysis of a shape, this feature enables capture of imperfectness of
33
d b c
Figure 3.1: Illustration of medial axis transform denition in two dimensions. (Top) All balls (in the 2D case, disks) satisfy the rst condition of Denition 3.1. However, balls a, b, and d are not the medial axis balls since they do not satisfy the maximality condition (i.e., the second condition of the denition). (Bottom) All of the balls shown in this gure are medial axis balls. The trajectory of their centers constitutes the medial axis. The radii of the balls together with the medial axis dene the medial axis transform.
34
geometry. However, for shape recognition, such sensitivity to noise may bring in additional complexity of reasoning. To evaluate spacing among a collection of objects, the medial axis transform of the negative (delta) volume of these objects can be computed. The minimum radius along the medial axis represents the smallest clearance, therefore the minimum spacing, among objects. The trajectory of medial axis depicts the safest navigation path that is the farthest from all obstacles. The relations between the size of the navigating object and the radius function dictates accessibility of the navigator through the space. Medial axes are a subset of Voronoi edges for polygons in two dimensions or for polyhedra in three dimensions. A generalized Voronoi diagram partitions the space into regions, each of which encloses points closer to a polygon edge or polyhedron face but no closer to others. The boundaries of these partitioned regions constitute Voronoi edges and represent the trajectories of points equidistant to boundary entities. Many algorithms for generating medial axis transforms are based on Voronoi diagrams. The following section describes a few mathematical properties of medial axis transform.
3.2
Properties
Medial axis transform exhibits several properties that enable representation of an object in an unambiguous and simpler manner. We shall summarize a few important theorems and results from previous literatures, followed by discussion on how we can utilize these properties for our geometric reasoning and representation. Regarding geometric properties of medial axis, Blum [7] presented the curvature relationship between the boundary of a planar gure and its medial axis. Nackman [44] studied how the radius function and the medial axis curvatures are related to the surface curvatures in three dimensions. Brandt [8] investigated the medial axis tangents, curvatures and rates of change of the radius function in terms of dierential parameters of the boundary. In terms of topologic properties of medial axis transform and its relationship
35
Figure 3.2: Mapping from a boundary point to the center of its medial axis ball. Such mapping is continuous. with the boundary of the region, Chiang [12] provided a proof that for a simple and compact region in R2 whose boundary curves are piecewise twice-dierentiable, the MAT is unique, connected and invertible. Sherbrooke [59] described the relationship between the maximum principle curvatures of its surface and the medial axis of a 3D object. He also proved connectivity of the medial axis by strong deformation retraction theorem. In the following, we shall summarize some of the theorems and results from [59], since they are the most fundamental and important to our applications. We begin with uniqueness and continuity of the medial axis transform:
Lemma 3.2 (Uniqueness and Continuity of Mapping to MAT) Let A be an n-dimensional compact sub-manifold of Rn and let MA(A) be its medial axis. Let P be an open subset of A which is G1 - and piecewise C 2 -continuous. Then for every point p P there is one and only one maximal ball touching p. Furthermore, the function M : P MA(A), which maps each point p P to the center of its maximal ball (Figure 3.2), is continuous. This lemma dictates that given a bounded and closed manifold, mapping from the
36
boundary of this manifold to its medial axis transform is unique and continuous. Since the mapping is one-on-one and continuous, one can reverse the mapping and obtain the manifold from the medial axis transform. Therefore, such mapping is invertible. In other words, we can reconstruct a region from its medial axis transform. This helps to represent an object in a dierent manner: describing an object by its innermost interior and the associated thickness metrics. In contrast to the boundary representation, where an object is represented by its enclosing boundaries, the medial axis transform provides an intrinsic description of objects. These two representations are both useful for shape manipulation and reasoning. For examples, boundary representation allows us to easily modify the shapes by blending a corner or tapering a surface. It also enables us to interrogate surface properties such as curvatures and normals. Medial axis transform, on the other hand, provides information such as thickness of regions, volume of an object, and clearance between two features. Boundary representation oers geometric information about the limit or extent of an object, whereas medial axis transform measures its content. Although the above lemma assumes that the boundary of the manifold should be G1 -continuous (its tangent direction is continuous) and piecewise C 2 -continuous (the second derivatives are continuous), it can be generalized to any shape with tangent discontinuities by replacing sharp corners or edges with innitesimal trimmed hyperspheres. As a result, all compact regions could be represented as manifolds bounded by piecewise C 2 -continuous entities joined G1 -continuously. In order to show how the medial axis is related to the boundary of the manifold, we shall need the following topological notion [43]: Denition 3.3 (Strong Deformation Retract) Let I be the closed interval [0, 1]. Let Y be a subspace of a topological space X . Then Y is called a strong deformation retract of X if there exists a continuous mapping H : X I X such that 1. H (x, 0) = x for x X , 2. H (x, 1) A for x X , 3. H (y, t) = y for y Y and t I .
37
H is called a strong deformation retraction.
Strong deformation retraction denes the homotopic relationship from a topological space to its subspace. The following theorem [59] states that the medial axis is a strong deformation retract of a manifold.
Theorem 3.4 (Medial Axis Retract Theorem) Let A be a compact sub-manifold of Rn with a G1 -continuous boundary A which is also piecewise C 2 -continuous. Then the medial axis of A, MA(A), is a strong deformation retract of A. In particular, if A is path connected, then MA(A) is path connected. The medial axis is a strong deformation retract of the manifold it represents and is a result of a smooth deformation. Since the boundary of a manifold is path connected, the medial axis is path connected. Furthermore, due to homotopic transformation from the manifold to its medial axis, the medial axis preserves the topology, allowing one to reason about shapes more easily with a lower dimensional representation. Figure 3.3 shows a strong deformation retract of a rectangular 2D region. Strong deformation retraction shrinks the region into thinner and smaller subspace. Of all possible strong deformation retraction, medial axis transform retracts the region uniformly from its boundary and records the distances it travels from the boundary to the nal shrunk entity. Therefore, medial axis transform not only preserves information regarding shapes of an object, but also provides equivalent, complete, and more concise knowledge. We shall utilize such characteristics of medial axis transform for many of our planning applications. The next section reviews some of the applications based on the medial axis transform.
38
a b c d e
Figure 3.3: Strong deformation retract of a rectangular region. The medial axis is a strong deformation retract of the region (in order of a, b, c, d, and e). Since the region is path connected, so is its medial axis.
3.3
Overview of MAT Applications
Medial axis transform has been widely employed in many applications, such as pattern recognition of digital images [42], nite element mesh generation [24, 47], analysis of VLSI designs [41], path generation for pocket machining [48, 25], mid-surface extraction for engineering analysis [56], shape blending in computer animation [58], design rule checking for sheet metal components [52], punch shape recognition [11], robotic motion planning [33], feature recognition [20], and biological shape analysis [6]. Although applications of MAT spread in a very wide range of engineering and scientic elds, it has not yet been widely utilized in mechanical engineering domain. Here an overview on how this technique can be more attractive and useful to mechanical engineering is discussed.
Engineering Design:
Vimawala et al. [64] employed medial axis transform as design optimization tools: they described two-dimensional shapes by its MAT and then optimized the radius function according to specic engineering criteria such as to maximize the moment of inertia about an axis. The design and optimization variables are the medial axis radii at some control points of the medial axis. The radius function is then linearly
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interpolated from the values at the control points. The optimization results in temporarily faulty medial axis transform since the distances from the control point to its nearest boundary points are allowed to have dierent values, referred as right and left radii. To x the problem, a valid medial axis transform is regenerated from the 2D shape represented by the faulty MAT. This process is iterated until the nal shape converges. Although this technique provides a useful tool for design optimization, designing objects from scratch by medial axis transform may be dicult. This is due to limited freedom or rigorous constraints in choosing or dening the radius function that satises the MAT denition, and due to the non-intuition of visualizing an object via MAT. The problem is magnied in three dimensions. However, it may assist designs by providing symmetry and volumetric information, and by oering tools for evaluating and articulating the resulting geometry. The role of MAT for design evaluation is essential.
Engineering Analysis:
The rst step toward engineering analysis is discretization of solid objects, referred to as mesh generation. Many mesh generation techniques exist such as advancing front, octree, or Delaunay triangulation approaches. However, they do not exhibit structural characteristics of shapes. In other words, meshes resulting from these techniques do not necessarily capture the global description or features of objects such as ribs, corners, bosses, or slots. Since inappropriate meshes could introduce numerical problems or inaccurate results, generating structured meshes is signicant. Medial axis transform provides tools for capturing symmetry of objects. Not only so, it preserves topology of objects. Features can be reasoned about in a lower dimension, which simplies complexity of the analysis. In addition, dimensionality is assigned onto the medial axis, allowing to capture global geometric variance. G ursoy [24] proposed approaches based on medial axis transform to decompose a 2D region into sub-domains. Triangular meshes are generated in individual subdomains according to their thickness information (i.e., the associated medial axis
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radii). Thin features are mapped with ner meshes whereas thicker regions are lled with courser meshes. In addition, adaptive meshing schemes can be applied to accommodate regions close to singularity.
Manufacturing Planning and Manufacturability Analysis:

Manufacturing planning is one of the attractive areas in which MAT could contribute the most, since shape analysis needs to be performed to generate reliable and practical process sequences compromised to specic manufacturing characteristics. Several design-for-manufacturing rules have been established to ensure parts can be built with good quality for a given process. However, common practice of verifying these design rules relies on graphical visualization of shapes and identication of possible designrule violation interactively. This interactive approach does not guarantee complete design rule checking; often only expertise of craftsmanship can oer more valuable advice. MAT, on the other hand, helps to identify features or to verify the design-formanufacturing rules. For instance, MAT can be exploited to determine uniformness of a shape, sharpness of a corner, clearance of an assembly, and a contracting point of a shape. MAT can also help to compute appropriate process parameters, such as cutter radius, feed-rates, or location for pins or gates for molding or casting processes. Recently, Radhakrishnan et al. [52] employed the medial axis transform for designrule checking in sheet metal design. However, the potential of medial axis transform applications is still to be explored.
3.4
Existing Approaches
Skeletonization or medial axis transform extraction of digital images has been widely studied for the past few decades in computer vision society. This technique has been very popular in image processing, pattern recognition, and shape analysis. The input to this skeletonization is an array of image pixels, possibly with noises; the output is a thinned representation of the original data image. Among the
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various properties of the medial axis transform, invertibility, dimension reduction, and preservation of topological and geometric equivalence is of the most importance. The accuracy of the skeletons depends on user-specied parameters as well as level of noise in the input image. Two dierent categories [10] of approaches have been proposed. The majority of these algorithms are region-based, where the input is usually an array of lled image data. The pixels of images are iteratively thinned, or equivalently, redundant pixels are successively deleted until a nal skeleton is derived. The second category is based on the boundaries of images. The boundaries are extracted via edge detection and skeletons are generated directly from the boundary data. The latter is considered to be more ecient than the region-based approaches but would need to resolve issues related to noisy boundary data input. A comprehensive survey of thinning approaches can be found in [32]. Over 130 of articles are referenced in that paper. Among these are sequential thinning algorithms and parallel thinning methods. It is well criticized in [17] that pure thinning approaches are inadequate in representing its topologically equivalent skeletons. More specically, the connectivity of the skeleton is dicult to maintain. Boundary-based approaches, on the other hand, is more stable and less problematic. However, the overhead of these approaches is to detect the boundary of the image and removing excessive small branches due to noisy input. Ogniewicz [46] proposed an approach that generates the Voronoi diagram of the boundary points (pixels) and extracts the skeleton through pruning procedures that take into account the noise level and accuracy requirement. Our focus is on the exact skeleton representation of a continuous description of a 2D or 3D domain since they are the most useful for engineering applications. Current proposed approaches are classied into the following categories: Discretization Thinning Tracing
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Subdivision Incremental Pairing Each of these categories will be discussed in detail in the following subsections. Note that the terms skeletons and medial axes are often interchangeable. The next section will discuss suitability of these approaches to our process planning applications.
Discretization
In this category of approaches, boundaries of a domain are sampled and medial axes are generated from the set of discrete boundary points. These algorithms utilize Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulation in generating discrete medial axis representation. Pruning procedures are then applied to handle errors in sampling and to represent hierarchical skeleton representation. Brandt [9, 10] used the regular set model to relate the boundary sampling density to the discrete skeleton for an accurate skeleton approximation. Once boundaries are sampled, the Voronoi diagram of the point set is generated and edges of the Voronoi diagram internal to the image are extracted. Pruning operations can then be applied to remove small branches due to noise or digitization errors introduced during sampling. Original images can be regenerated without introducing signicant errors based on the regular set model analysis. Ogniewicz [46, 45] proposed the hierarchical or multi-scale representation of skeletons. His approach focused on the representation and pruning of the Voronoi diagram generated from discrete boundary point set. He associated with skeleton segments the prominence values that measure the signicance of existence of particular segments. These attributes include potential residual (the path distance between its dening boundary points), circularity residual (the ratio of the medial axis disk perimeter to the path distance of its dening points), chord residual (the ratio between the shortest
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distance to its path distance). One of these measures can be applied for the hierarchical skeleton representation, where each Voronoi edge and vertex is associated with a hierarchy table indicating the level of signicance and the corresponding hierarchy. Reddy et al. [55], on the other hand, employed a generalized Delaunay triangulation technique on the bounding vertices, edges and faces (in case of 3D) of an object. The dual of this triangulation, the generalized Voronoi diagram, is then constructed that represents the skeleton of an object. Turkiyyah et al. [63] also proposed an algorithm based on the Delaunay triangulation, but on the discretized boundary point set instead of mixed dimensional entities. He improved the slow convergence rate of generating triangulation of skeletons by applying a sequence of local constrained optimizations on a smaller set of triangulation to achieve the required accuracy. The optimization adjusts and generates the geometry of the skeleton patches and edge points to satisfy the accuracy requirement of the skeleton geometry.
Thinning
The algorithms in this category simulate the grass-re process. They thin an object by successively osetting its boundary toward its interior until vanishing. The amount of oset at each step depends on topology and connectivity of original objects. In contrast, most of the thinning algorithms for digital images are based on iterative deletion of pixels one step at a time. Montanari [42] identied the breakpoints where topology of oset curves is changed during osetting. Among these breakpoints, he dened as an initial breakpoint the point where an oset curve changes its connectivity, for example, when a curve is split into two connected pieces during osetting; as the intermediate breakpoint the point where a boundary edge vanishes as a result of trimming; as the nal breakpoint the point where the entire oset curve shrinks to a single point. By iteratively osetting the boundary curves and eciently identifying these breakpoints, one can locate all the critical points on the medial axis, together with geometry of the skeleton segments that connect them. G ursoy [24] extends his work by including circular arcs as boundary elements.
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Tracing
Tracing algorithms rst identify a point on the medial axis and then complete the medial axis by traversing along associated boundary elements. Chou [14] identied all the terminal (end) points on the medial axis. These are either at convex corners or centers of locally maximal positive curvatures. Bisectors are initiated from these terminal points along associated contour elements. When two bisectors meet, signaled by the fact that mapping between a boundary point and a bisector point is unique, they merge and generate a new bisector. This process continues until a bisector can no longer be extended from a terminal point. The algorithm terminates when all bisectors are initiated and traversed from all terminal points. Sherbrooke et al. [60, 61, 59] proposed an algorithm that constructs the medial axis transform of 3D polyhedra. All end points and branch points of skeletons are rst computed and edges of skeletons are traversed from these points along the associated polygonal facets. The skeleton faces are then identied by traversing along closed loops of skeleton edges.
Subdivision
Lee [34] proposed a divide-and-conquer approach that constructs the generalized Voronoi diagram for simple polygons. The medial axis transform can be easily extracted by removing the Voronoi edges connecting to concave vertices of the polygon. The algorithm recursively divides the polygonal boundaries into two lists of chains, where a chain is a sequence of polygon edges that are bounded by two convex vertices. The Voronoi diagrams of individual chains can be trivially constructed (by shooting vertical rays into innity). Merging two chains can be performed in O (n) by initiating a curve from the starting vertices of the two chains and traversing until it reaches the end of either chains. The overall algorithm exhibits time complexity O (n log n). Srinivasan et al. [62] extends Lees algorithm to computing generalized Voronoi diagram for polygons with holes. In their algorithm, both internal and external Voronoi
45
diagrams of individual contours are constructed and then merged. The merging process starts at a point on the merge curve and traces along the boundaries until a simple closed curve is completed. This merge point can be computed by selecting the topmost vertex on the inner boundary, locating the pre-merged Voronoi region that contains this vertex, and nding the bisectors between the vertex and the boundary associated with the identied Voronoi region. The merge point is the intersection point of an upward ray from the topmost vertex and the bisectors. The overall merging operation takes O (n log n + nh), where h is the number of holes and n is the total number of boundary edges. Choi [13] presented an MAT approximation algorithm in planar domain via domain decomposition. He subdivides the domain (with holes) into smaller simplyconnected planar sub-regions that overlap only at the joints where subdivision occurs. These joints can occur at the following places: convex sharp corners, centers of convex circular arcs, centers of inscribed osculating circles at sharp concave corners, or centers of special circles that connect inner boundary curves to the external one. Approximated medial axes based on Bezier-Bernstein curves are computed for individual sub-regions. The domain boundary corresponding to the approximated MAT is then computed (in discrete steps) and compared with the original domain geometry. If dierences exceed a certain tolerance value, the sub-region is further subdivided at the medial axis point where the error is maximum. Evans et al. [18] employed a top-down approach to construct the MAT trees for simply-connected curvilinear polygons and the MAT graphs for multiply-connected polygons. The algorithm temporarily constructs a MAT tree for polygons with holes and then connects with missing graph edges to form a MAT graph. The tree starts with either a sharp convex corner or the center of a convex circular arc. The edge between the root and its subtree is labeled by the bisector between the left wing and right wing of the contour initiated from the root. The tree is then divided into two subtrees when it encounters a branch point and the algorithm terminates when no more bisectors exist. Persson [48], on the other hand, proposed a bottom-up approach that constructs
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MAT for simply-connected polygons. Bisectors between two adjacent contour elements and the intersections of two adjacent bisectors are computed. Each of such bisector intersection points is associated with the clearance distance to its dening contour elements. The one with the smallest clearance value among all bisector intersection points is selected and a new bisector is initiated and cropped when it intersects another bisector. The process repeats until no intersection points exist that remain unselected. Held [25] provided proof and analysis to Perssons approach and experimentally showed that this approach seems to grow only linearly with the number of contour elements, except for some pathological test cases. This reduction in time is contributed by heuristically computing bisectors from the branch point with the smallest clearance distance. This is in the hope that fewer superuous bisectors that do not contribute to the nal set of skeletons need to be constructed during computation.
Incremental
Preparatas algorithm [51] involves two stages. The rst stage, reduction, constructs a sequence of polygons by removing one element per step in such a way that a medial axis branch can be inserted later in linear time during the reconstruction phase. Reduction continues until a convex polygon becomes a triangle or until a non-convex polygon is reduced to two elements, in which the medial axis can be trivially computed. The second stage, reconstruction, inserts one edge per step and updates the medial axis transform in constant time. For convex polygons, this algorithm performs in O (n log n). For non-convex polygons, MAT can be constructed in O (n2 ).
Pairing
The pairing approach aims at computing approximated MAT suitable for applications that do not require exact MAT representation. Rezayat [56] presented a surface-pairing approach to generate mid-surfaces of a solid model. Surface pairs are selected via some surface thickness criteria that capture thin-walled geometry. The adjacency of these selected surfaces along with pairing
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information is then recognized from topology of surfaces on the input model. This adjacency information, stored in a graph, represents topology and connectivity of the mid-surfaces patches which are then computed and joined.
3.5
Requirement of MAT Algorithms for Process Planning
To make medial axis transform useful in the context of process planning, the generated MAT representation should exhibit the following properties: Accuracy: Medial axis transform representation should be accurate for the purpose of shape reasoning and analysis. In process planning, we often need to evaluate geometry of an object to determine its manufacturability associated with a specic fabrication process. Therefore, a MAT representation that accurately reects the object geometry is required. Conciseness: When more concise representation for medial axis transform is available, it should be utilized. For instance, medial axes of a 2D polygon may consist of parabolic segments. The medial axis transform should utilize these analytical non-linear geometry representation in preference to approximated linearized segments. Associativity: Doubly-linked associativity between a boundary point and the corresponding medial axis transform is essential. For instance, at a medial axis point, we could identify the closest boundary points. Conversely, we also wish to know the corresponding medial axis point whose medial axis ball contacts a given boundary point. The algorithms that generate the MAT should satisfy the following criteria: Complexity: Since additive/subtractive SFF is an iterative manufacturing process that involves several build cycles, the planning demand is higher than that
48
of conventional processes. Eciency of the algorithm plays an essential role to overall process planning. Completeness: The algorithm should take any smooth 3D CAD models (possibly with holes) as inputs and compute their MATs successfully. In the context of process planning, such CAD models are usually described by boundary representation.
3.6
Evaluation of Existing MAT Algorithms for Process Planning
Given a smooth 3D solid model as input, the above requirements are compared with several existing approaches discussed in section 3.4. The digital thinning approaches digitize an object into voxels and apply thinning procedures to trim away voxels not on the medial axis. Although aggressive digitization with very ne resolution produces a fairly accurate approximation of the medial axis transform, it is less practical due to amount of time and space required. In addition, the generated medial axis transform is represented by discrete point set, and in its raw form no connectivity information on the medial axis is available. Similarly, accuracy of the medial axis transform generated from discretization methods depends upon sampling densities of the object boundaries. The running time, in turn, is penalized by accuracy of the result. The medial axis transform, extracted from the generated Voronoi diagram, consists of many small linearized segments. The tracing algorithms are the most suitable for smooth non-linear boundaries. In order to achieve a good approximation of MAT, the tracing steps must be small. This greatly reduces their performance. The analytical approaches, thinning and subdivision, exhibit accurate and concise MAT representation when analytical forms are available. Complexity of these algorithms is therefore reduced in these circumstances. Subdivision methods perform better than the thinning approaches in that pairwise comparisons to identify branch
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points of MAT are required at each oset step of thinning algorithms. From the above analysis, 2D analytical subdivision approaches seem to be the most suitable for assisting process planning of additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication. The reasons are: Directionality is one of the characteristics in solid freeform fabrication. Many sub-processes in additive/subtractive SFF involve 2D operations. For examples, material deposition is usually performed at incremental 2D layers. A 2D MAT algorithm can eciently compute the accurate MAT for the corresponding geometry. 3D MAT algorithms tessellate or digitize an object. Consequently, articial medial axis branches may appear due to quantization errors. 2D analytic approaches, on the other hand, oer a more concise and cleaner solution. Lees divide-and-conquer subdivision method oers asymptotically optimal algorithm (O (n log n)); other approaches, especially 3D algorithms, are computationally expensive. For the purpose of planning solid freeform fabrication, slicing a 3D object into a set of 2D planar gures is a way to reduce dimensionality and complexity of the computation. Many mechanical designs consist of extruded features, whose cross-sections are often bounded by linear segments or circular arc entities. Analytical approaches take advantages of these elementary primitives and compute MAT with the help of closed-form analytical solutions for geometric operations. In addition, a nonlinear curve can be approximated by few tangently continuous circular arcs ( G1 -continuous arc splines) [29] with very ne accuracy. As a result, number of entities required to approximate a nonlinear curve is usually small, compared with linear approximation. Therefore, complexity of computing MAT of regions bounded by nonlinear curves can be greatly reduced with the analytical subdivision method than with the tracing approaches. Lees and Shrinivisans algorithms utilizes the fact that the Voronoi diagrams and the medial axis of a 2D gure are planar graphs. Their algorithms recursively
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construct the Voronoi diagrams of two subsets in terms of planar graphs, and merge the results via a sequence of dividing edges. The medial axis transform is then extracted from the generalized Voronoi diagram, whose edges represent the geometry of the medial axis and are labeled with corresponding radius information. Nevertheless, geometry of the medial axis is not of particular importance for some of our applications. The most crucial aspect obtained from the medial axis transform is the extraction of proximity information of features in the gure. For example, we might be only interested in knowing whether two features are so close together that they prohibit a machining tool from accessing their feature proles. The locations of points that are equidistant to these two features are not of our particular interest. Furthermore, we would like to identify the portion of the features or boundaries that produce such access hurdles. Such information is useful for further design modication for manufacturability. Therefore, a representation that associates the boundary directly to the proximity metrics is very crucial. We shall propose an ecient representation that suits our applications based on Lees and Shrinivisans methodology. The proposed method directly associates boundary points to the corresponding proximity metrics so that proximity information is immediately available at any given boundary point. In addition, we found that by utilizing such representation we Improve the performance and simplify the implementation complexity of Lees and Shrinivasans algorithms Reduce the redundancy of dening medial axis transform when a boundary representation is also available Provide simpler geometric operations during MAT computation Extend the applicable input domain to arbitrarily 2D shapes bounded by nonlinear entities with the same methodology The following chapter describes the proposed representation and the method to compute 2D medial axis transform.
Chapter 4 Computing Medial Axis Transforms

4.1 Preliminary
Let A be a connected and compact (closed and bounded) region in Rn with regular (none-self-intersected) and at least G1 - and piecewise C 2 -continuous boundaries. With the following denitions and lemmas, we shall introduce the notion of the clearance function and its relationship with the medial axis transform (MAT). First, we shall dene the projection M from a boundary point p of A onto the medial axis MA(A). Denition 4.1 (Projection of a Boundary Point onto Medial Axis) Let the set of boundary points of a connected, compact, and regular region A be P , and the set of medial axis points of A be Q. The projection M : P Q projects a boundary point p P onto such a medial axis point Mp Q that the medial axis ball centered at Mp touches A at p. (Figure 4.1)
The projected medial axis point Mp of a given boundary point p is the point on the medial axis closest to the given boundary point and on its positive normal line. 51
CHAPTER 4. COMPUTING MEDIAL AXIS TRANSFORMS
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Figure 4.1: Projection of boundary points onto the medial axis. Mp is also the center of the locally maximal ball tangent to the boundary at p. The following lemma shows that such projection exists and is unique for every boundary point of the compact region, and that the projection is continuous for a continuous boundary.
Lemma 4.2 (Existence, Uniqueness, and Continuity of Projection) The projection M from a boundary point p of A onto a medial axis point Mp exists uniquely and is continuous.
Proof. This result is immediately followed from Lemma 3.2.
The following denes a function that records the projection distance from boundary to the medial axis.
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Figure 4.2: Clearance function on the boundary of the region shown in Figure 4.1. The x-axis denotes a parameterization of the boundary whereas the y-axis represents the distance of projection from a boundary point to its associated medial axis point. Denition 4.3 (Clearance Function) Let P be the set of boundary points of A. The clearance function C : P R maps a boundary point p P to the distance between p to its projection Mp (Figure 3.2 and 4.2). Furthermore, since the medial axis ball centered at Mp is tangent to A at p, Mp = p + Cp np , where np is the unit normal vector at p pointing toward the interior of A; Cp is the distance of projection.
Lemma 4.4 (Existence, Uniqueness, and Continuity of Clearance Function) The clearance function on the boundary of A is unique and continuous. Proof. From Denition 4.3, we have Mp = p + Cp np
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Cp exists and is unique because Mp , p, np exist and are unique (from Lemma 3.2). Furthermore, since p and np are continuous from our assumption and Mp is continuous according to Lemma 4.2, Cp is continuous by the continuity theorem.
The clearance function maps a set of boundary points of A to the radii of the associated medial axis balls. Since each medial axis ball must touch two or more boundary points, the projection from boundaries of a given compact region completely denes the medial axis. Moreover, together with the clearance function, the projection denes the medial axis transform.
Proposition 4.5 (Medial Axis Transform and Clearance Function) Let C be the clearance function associated with boundary of A. The medial axis MA(A) and medial axis transform MAT(A) can be formulated as MA(A) = { x | x = p + Cp np , p A } MAT(A) = { (x, Cp) | x = p + Cp np , p A } , where np is the unit normal and Cp is the clearance function value at a boundary point p.
Given the boundary representation of a compact region, the MAT can be concisely described by the clearance function associated with boundary points of the region. The task of computing MAT of a compact region is equivalent to that of computing the clearance function. To achieve this, we shall introduce the notion of bisecting functions. Denition 4.6 (Bisecting Point and Bisecting Distance) The bisecting point b1,2 between two boundary points p1 and p2 (p1 = p2 ) is the point equidistant to and on the normal directions of p1 and p2 (Figure 4.3). The
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Figure 4.3: Bisecting point and bisecting distance. b1,2 denotes the bisecting point between p1 and p2 . Note that the bisecting point and distance between p1 and p3 are not dened since no bisecting point exists that satises the Equation 4.1 for p1 and p3 . Similarly, b4,5 is the bisecting point and d4,5 is the bisecting distance for points p4 and p5 . distance d1,2 from p1 and p2 to the bisecting point b1,2 is called the bisecting distance between p1 and p2 . The bisecting point b1,2 and distance d1,2 satises the following equation if they exist: b1,2 = p1 + d1,2 n1 = p2 + d1,2 n2 for d1,2 R > 0 (4.1)
Bisecting distance is dened for a pair of boundary points. We shall dene a function that maps the pairs of boundary points to their bisecting distances. Denition 4.7 (Bisecting Function) Let P be the set of boundary points of a compact region. For any two distinct points
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p1 , p2 on P, we dene the bisecting function B : P P R as the function that maps a pair of boundary points to their bisecting distance if it exists, or innity otherwise. d if d > 0 = p1 + d np = p2 + d np , 1 2 = otherwise.
Bp1 ,p2
We dene the bisecting function of two identical points to be d = if d > 0 = limq1 p+ (q1 + d nq 1 ) = limq2 p (q2 + d nq 2 ), otherwise.
Bp,p
Figure 4.4 shows a portion of the bisecting function for an example 2D region.
Corollary 4.8 (Transitiveness and Symmetry of Bisecting Functions) Assume that the bisecting functions Bp,q , Bq,r are dened and nite for three distinct boundary points p, q, r, then Bp,q = Bq,p Bp,q = Bq,r = Bp,q = Bp,r Proof. These can be derived from Denition 4.6. Detailed proof is omitted here.
Note that for an arbitrary pair of boundary points (p, q), the bisecting distance may not be dened. Let p0 and q0 be a pair of boundary points where the bisecting distance is dened. We shall show that the bisecting function Bp,q is continuous in the neighborhood of p = p0 , q = q0 .
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Figure 4.4: Bisecting functions for an example 2D region. The X and Y axes denote a continuous parameterization of the boundary curve, whereas the Z axis denotes the bisecting function value for a point in X and the other in Y. The bisecting function B1 represents the bisecting distances between a point in [a, b] and a corresponding point in [c, d]. Similarly, B2 , B3 record the bisecting distances between a point in [a, b] and corresponding points in [e, f ], [g, h] respectively. Note that only a portion of all possible bisecting functions are shown in this gure.
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Lemma 4.9 (Continuity of Bisecting Functions) Let p0 , q0 be a pair of boundary points whose bisecting point and distance exist. The bisecting function Bp,q is continuous in the neighborhood of p = p0 , q = q0 . Proof. We know that at p = p0 and q = q0 , Bp,q is dened. Therefore, there exists Bp,q 0 such that p0 + Bp0 ,q0 np 0 = q0 + Bp0 ,q0 nq 0 We can rewrite the above equation as Bp0 ,q0 (np 0 nq 0 ) = (p0 q0 ) Let us rst consider the case where np 0 = nq 0 . Since boundaries and their normals are continuous and Bp0 ,q0 is dened, we can conclude that Bp,q is continuous in the neighborhood of p = p0 , q = q0 from the continuity theorem. When np 0 = nq 0 , p0 must equal to q0 , for Bp0 ,q0 exists. By denition, Bp0 ,q0 is the limit of the bisecting distance in the neighborhood of p0 , q0 . Therefore, the bisecting function for p and q exists and is continuous in the neighborhood of p = p0 , q = q0 .
From bisecting functions of pairs of boundary points, we could construct the clearance function as follows:
Lemma 4.10 (Clearance Function as Inmum of Bisecting Functions) Given a boundary point p of the region A, the clearance function value Cp at p is the inmum of all bisecting functions between p and any point q A: (Figure 4.5) Cp = inf Bp,q
q
Proof. Each bisecting distance Bp,q corresponds to a ball tangent to p and q with radius Bp,q if it exists. By denition, the medial axis ball associated with a boundary
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Figure 4.5: Bisecting functions and the clearance function. All bisecting functions associated with points in [a, b] are shown in this plot. This gure is the result of projecting the bisecting functions in Figure 4.4 onto the X Z plane. The clearance function (shown as a thick curve) is the inmum of these bisecting functions. point p is the ball tangent to p and locally maximal. This local maximality can be achieved by shrinking an innitely large ball tangent to p until the ball contains no boundary points. Equivalently, such a medial axis ball is the smallest among the many balls tangent to p and any other boundary points. Since the clearance function value Cp at p equals to the radius of the medial axis ball associated with the point p, Cp equals to the inmum of all bisecting distances associated with p, i.e., inf Bp,q .
q
Figure 4.5 projects multiple bisecting functions shown in the Figure 4.4 onto the XZ plane, where the Z-axis records all dened bisecting distances between a boundary point in X and any other boundary points. Figure 4.6 shows a more general interpretation of the relationship between bisecting functions and the clearance function. The curve representing the clearance function is the lower envelope of all the bisecting function curves. In summary, the denitions and lemmas provided in this section suggest: The medial axis transform of a compact region can be uniquely dened by the
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Figure 4.6: Clearance function as inmum of bisecting functions. clearance function on the boundary. The clearance function exists, and it is unique and continuous. It can be computed by taking the inmum of all bisecting functions between pairs of boundary points. The rst conclusion ensures that it suces to compute the clearance function for the medial axis transform. Using the clearance function to represent MAT is more concise since a boundary representation of the object is already available as the input. In addition, the clearance function maps a boundary point in Rn to a scalar representing the clearance metric associated with that boundary point. Such associativity is needed for spatial reasoning in the context of manufacturing process planning. The second conclusion allows us to compute the clearance function by nding the inmum of bisecting functions. Since the clearance function is continuous, we could utilize a tracing methodology to nd their inmum values directly. To visualize the relationship between the clearance function and MAT, we could plot the clearance function on the boundary in the (n+1)-th dimension for an object in Rn . For instance, for a 2D compact, regular, and connected region A, we could draw
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the region A on the X-Y plane and plot the clearance function in Z (see Figure 4.7). The area under the clearance function forms a face perpendicular to A. The curve representing the clearance function in this augmented space can be described as = { (p, Cp ) | p A } , whereas the face F under the curve in the augmented space can be formulated as F = { (p, t) | 0 t Cp , p A } As we bend the clearance face toward interior of A, the projection of onto A moves away from the boundary toward the medial axis. When we completely fold the clearance face onto the X-Y plane, the clearance curve becomes located on the medial axis. The face F under the curve now constitutes the interior of A. It can be seen that the boundary together with the clearance function oers a volumetric representation of a region. This is in contrast to pure boundary representation, where analysis and evaluation of these metrics usually require explicit computation and reasoning. The clearance function and boundary representation provide readily available information for fast geometric reasoning, which we shall explore in the next few chapters. Figure 4.8 shows a visualization of the 3D rectangular box with its clearance function. In the next section, we propose a method of computing the clearance function for a compact region in R2 .
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Figure 4.7: Visualization of the clearance function for an example 2D region. The top gure shows the clearance function attached to the boundary of the region; the middle gure shows bending of the clearance function in progress with the angle ; the bottom gure shows that the medial axis is the result of projection of the clearance function curve.
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(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Figure 4.8: Visualization of the clearance function for a 3D object. Figure (b) shows the medial axis of the rectangular box depicted in Figure (a). In gure (c), the bounding surfaces of the box are developed on a planar domain. The clearance function associated with bounding points of the box is plotted perpendicularly to the developed surfaces, as shown in Figure (d).
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4.2
Algorithm for Smooth 2D Compact Regions
Since MAT can be trivially converted from the clearance function, the task of computing MAT becomes to nd the clearance function. As shown in the previous section, the clearance function is the inmum of all bisecting distances associated with the boundary points. A naive approach is to explicitly compute the bisecting distances for all pairs of boundary points and then nd their inmum. This computation, however, exhibits quartic complexity with respect to the number of boundary elements or points. In this section, we shall introduce a more ecient algorithm to computing the clearance function on the boundary of a 2D compact, regular, and connected region bounded by at least G1 - and piecewise C 2 - continuous curves.
4.2.1
Overview of the Approach
The approach described in this section is based on earlier work by Lee [35], Srinivasan [62], and Chou [14]. Lee constructed the Voronoi diagram of a simply-connected polygon in O (n log n) with a divide-and-conquer approach; Srinivasan extended Lees method to computing Voronoi diagrams of 2D polygons with holes; Chou, on the other hand, proposed an approach to computing Voronoi diagrams of simply-connected planar shapes with arbitrarily curved boundary. These approaches explicitly compute geometry of the Voronoi edges or medial axes in the planar domain. Furthermore, they rely on graph or tree structures to maintain connectivity of these entities. In this section, we shall generalize their work and apply it to the proposed paradigm: representing medial axis transform by the clearance functions. We shall also see that with the proposed paradigm, tedious graph manipulation during computation of MAT can be avoided, associativity from any boundary point to its clearance metric is directly maintained, computation of clearance functions is more ecient than that of MAT, and such a representation is more concise than the graph-based representation. Let the boundary curves of a 2D compact, regular, and connected region A R2 be 0 , 1 , 2 , . . . , m , where m is the number of holes in A. Let 0 be the outer loop and i (i > 0) be the inner loops. Each boundary curve i is oriented in such
65
a way that interior of A is on the left of boundary curves (i.e., they follow the right hand rule.) In other words, 0 is oriented counterclockwise and i (i > 0) is oriented clockwise. We assume 0 , 1 , . . . , m are at least G1 - and piecewise C 2 -continuous. We further assume that curvatures along the boundary curves have strict local maxima (as opposed to non-strict maxima). These conditions eliminate possibilities of degeneracy such as sharp corners or convex circular arc segments. We shall discuss how the proposed method can be generalized to these degenerate cases in the next section. In the proposed method, clearance functions are rst constructed individually. That is, the clearance function at this stage is computed in ignorance of existence of other contour curves. For the outer loop, the computed clearance function represents the simple region (i.e., without holes) bounded by this loop. For an inner loop, the clearance function corresponds to exterior of the inner contour. Clearly, the original region is the intersection of the simple region bounded by the outer loop and many unbounded regions outside the inner boundaries. We then synchronize the individual clearance functions to reect such intersection. The following sub-section describes the procedure of constructing the clearance functions for individual contour curves in ignorance of existence of others. Upon these individual clearance functions computed, we shall show how they can be synchronized to reect the intersection of the regions.
4.2.2
Computing Individual Clearance Functions
We shall use to denote a boundary curve in {0 , 1 , . . . , m }. Let be parameterized by its arc length s [0, ||], where || is the total curve length of . Since (s) is closed and bounded, it is periodic with respect to the total curve length ||. Let S = {s0 , s1 , . . . , sh1 } be a list of knots where the curvatures of are positive and locally maximal. We append sh = s0 + || to the list S so that (s0 ) = (sh ): S = {s0 , s1 , . . . , sh1 , sh }. The procedure of computing the clearance function for a contour curve in the domain I = [s0 , sh ] is described as follows:
66
Algorithm 4.1 (ConstructIndividualClearanceFunction) Input: I = [s0 , sh ]; s0 , s1 , . . . , sh are the knots in I Output: Clearance function C (s I ) = inf B (s, s )
s I
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
if (h == 1) return C (s) = ; IL = [s0 , s CL(s IL ) = ConstructIndividualClearanceFunction(IL ); CR (s IR ) = ConstructIndividualClearanceFunction(IR ); C (s I ) = MergeIndividualClearanceFunction(CL (s IL ), CR (s IR ))

h 2
], IR = [s
h 2
, sh ],
When there contain no knots in the continuous interval I (i.e., no local maximum of positive curvatures in I ), it can be derived from the result of [14] that no bisecting functions are dened for any pair of boundary points. Therefore, we could simply initialize the clearance function C (s) = for s I . Next, we subdivide the parameter space into two halves: I1 = [s0 , s [s
h 2 h 2
] and I2 =
, sh ]. Assume that the clearance functions for these two sub-intervals have been I2 .
computed. Now we wish to construct the clearance function C (s I ) for the interval I = I1 By denition, we have CL (s IL ) = inf B (s, s )
s IL
CR (s IR ) = inf B (s, s )
s IR s I
C (s I ) = inf B (s, s ) =
s {IL
inf
IR }
B (s, s )
s IR
= min( inf B (s, s ), inf B (s, s ))

s IL
67
For a given point s IL , C (s ) = inf B (s , s )

s I
s {IL
inf
IR }
B (s , s )
s IR
= min( inf B (s , s ), inf B (s , s ))

s IL
= min(CL(s ), inf B (s , s ))
s IR
Similarly, for a given point sr IR , C (sr ) = inf B (sr , s )

s I
s {IL
inf
IR }
B (s r , s )
s IR
= min( inf B (sr , s ), inf B (sr , s ))

s IL s IL
= min( inf B (sr , s ), CR (sr )) Therefore, we could compute C (s ) by nding the minimum between CL (s ) and inf B (s , s ), and compute C (sr ) by nding the minimum between CR (sr ) and
s IR s IL
inf B (sr , s ). The following steps outline the procedure of constructing C (s I = {IL IR }),
given CL (s IL ) and CR (s IR ).
68
Algorithm 4.2 (MergeClearanceFunction) Input: CL (s IL ), IL = [s0 , s Output: C (s I ), I = {IL [Initialization Stage:] 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. s = sr = s if CL (s if CR (s

h 2 h 2 h 2
IR } = [s0 , sh ]
h 2
]; CR (s IR ), IR = [s
h 2
, sh ],
;
h 2 h 2
) is smaller than CR (s ) is smaller than CL (s
) and B (s ) and B (s
h 2 h 2
,s ,s
h 2 h 2
) s = arg inf B (s
s IL
h 2 h 2
,s ) ,s )
) sr = arg inf B (s
s IR
C (s ) = C (s r ) = B (s , sr ) Trace s , sr simultaneously: s = s , sr = sr + r ; C (s ) = C (sr ) = B (s , sr ) Stop tracing when either B (s , sr ) equals CL (s ) or B (s , sr ) equals CR (sr ). if (B (s , sr ) equals CL (s )) s = arg inf B (s , s ); C (s : s ) = CL (s : s ); s = s if (B (s , sr ) equals CR (sr ))
s I sr = arg inf B (sr , s ); s I C (s r : s r ) = C R (s r : s r ); s r = s r
[Tracing Stage:]
Goto 5. Continue tracing until s / IL , sr / IR , or until B (s , sr ) undened
In the initialization stage, we wish to nd a pair (s , sr ) such that B (s , sr ) is s, sr ), the inmum among all the bisecting functions at s or sr (i.e., s = arg inf B (
s IL
sr = arg inf B (s , s ), and C (s ) = C (sr ) = B (s , sr )).

s IR
In the tracing stage, we
trace the inmum of bisecting functions starting from such (s , sr ) until the clearance functions are all updated for every point in IL and IR . Finding an initial pair (s , sr ) is accomplished by looking at the neighborhood of (s , sr ) = (s
h 2
,s
h 2
) and comparing the values among B (s , sr ), CL(s ), and CR (sr ).
Our goal is not only to locate the pair (s , sr ) such that the bisecting distance B (s , sr ) is minimum (i.e., B (s , sr ) = inf B (s , s ) = inf B ( s, sr ) ), but also as we trace
s IL s IR
forward, the bisecting function in the neighborhood of such (s , sr ) remains minimum. Steps 1-4 achieve this goal (Figure 4.9). Next, we trace the inmum bisecting function until minimality is no longer maintained (Step 6). We then look for a new value of s or sr where the bisecting function has the same minimum value (Steps 7-8), and initiate a new bisecting function as the clearance function as we trace s and sr . Such a tracing step continues (Step 9) until
69
Figure 4.9: Initializing the merged clearance function. (A) Since B (s h , s h ) is 2 2 smaller than CL (s h ) and CR (s h ), the new clearance function initiates at s = s h 2 2 2 and sr = s h . (B) Since B (s h , s h ) is greater than CR (s h ), the clearance function 2 2 2 2 initiates at s = s h and sr equal to its counterpart on CR (s).
2
70
CL CR
(5) s0
(4)
(3) (1) (1) s

h 2
(2)
(3)
(5) s
sh
: the merged clearance function C (s) Figure 4.10: Tracing the clearance function. Step (1) initiates the clearance function. Step (2) advances sr according to Step 8 of the algorithm 4.2. Step (3) continues tracing. Step (4) advances s according to Step 7 of the algorithm. Step (5) completes the tracing. either s IL ,sr IR has been completely traced or B (s , sr ) is no longer dened (Figure 4.10). The proof of correctness of this procedure to construct the inmum of bisecting functions is discussed in the section 4.3. We shall explain a revised method to update clearance functions among distinct loops in the next sub-section.
4.2.3
Synchronizing Clearance Functions
The tracing procedure to nd continuous inmum bisecting functions among distinct loops is similar to the one used in computing individual clearance functions. The only dierence is on computing the initial pair (s , sr ). We wish to nd a pair of points, each of which on a distinct loop, such that the bisecting distance B (s , sr ) is the inmum of all bisecting functions at s or sr . In other words, B (s , sr ) is equal to the clearance values at s and sr . Let I denote the domain associated with the clearance function to be synchronized. Let I denote a set of domains associated with all the previously synchronized clearance functions. I is initialized to the domain of the outer loop; I corresponds to an inner loop.
71
Algorithm 4.3 (SynchronizeClearanceFunctions) Input: CL (s I ), CR (s I ) Output: C (s {I I }) [Initialization Stage:] 1. 2. sr = arg max ( s).y ()
s I
s = arg min B (s , s )
s I
[Tracing Stage:] 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Trace s , sr simultaneously: s = s , sr = sr + r ; C (s ) = C (sr ) = B (s , sr ) Stop tracing when either B (s , sr ) equals CL (s ) or B (s , sr ) equals CR (sr ).
s I if (B (s , sr ) equals CR (sr )) sr = arg inf B (sr , s ); C (sr : s r ) = C R (s r : s r ); s r = s r s I Goto 3. Continue tracing until s / I , sr / I , or until B (s , sr ) undened
if (B (s , sr ) equals CL (s )) s = arg inf B (s , s ); C (s : s ) = CL (s : s ); s = s
The merging process starts with nding a pair of parameters s , sr on the synchronized interval I and an inner loop interval I such that their bisecting distance B (s , sr ) is minimum at s I and sr I . This can be accomplished by taking the geometry of the inner loop into account: rst, we nd a point sr in I such that arg
s {I
inf
I }
B (s r , s ) I . It can be proved from [62] that any boundary point on its
convex hull satisfy this criteria. Here we simply select the topmost point for sr (Step 1). To nd s corresponding to such sr , we explicitly compute the bisecting function B ( s, sr ) for every s I and determine s = arg inf B ( s, sr ) (Step 2).
s I
Once the initial pair s , sr is computed, we trace the clearance function starting from them (Step 3) until the bisecting function minimality can no longer be maintained (Step 4). When this occurs, we nd a new pair of s , sr where the bisecting function has the same minimum value (Steps 5-6). We initiate a new bisecting function as the clearance function at s and sr . Such a tracing step continues (Step 7) until either s IL ,sr IR has been completely traced or B (s , sr ) is no longer dened. Note that the tracing steps are fundamentally the same with the one used for constructing clearance functions on individual boundary curves. The only dierence is that sr is on the current inner loop whereas s could be on any previously synchronized
72
inner loops or the outer loop.
4.2.4
Completing Clearance Functions
The overall procedure of computing the clearance functions for all contours of a compact region is stated as follows: Algorithm 4.4 (ConstructClearanceFunctions) Input: I0 , I1 , I2 , . . . , Im Output: Clearance functions in I0 , I1 , I2 , . . . , Im 1. for all I {I0 , I1 , I2 , . . . , Im } 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. ConstructSingleClearanceFunction(I ); end for I = I0 for all I {I1 , I2 , . . . , Im } SynchronizeClearanceFunctions(I , I ); I = I end for {I };
Steps 1-3 compute individual clearance functions in ignorance of other contour curves. Step 4 initializes the set of domain corresponding to the synchronized boundary. We then update the clearance functions incrementally by adding one inner loop at a time until every inner loop is considered and the corresponding clearance function is updated (Steps 5-8). The following section provides analysis of this algorithm.
4.3
Analysis of Algorithm
The algorithm described in Section 4.2 utilizes the clearance function representation to compute the medial axis transform of a 2D compact, regular, and connected region
73
bounded by smooth curves. The clearance function is computed by the divide-andconquer approach: a boundary curve is divided into subsets at the knots where the curvature is locally maximal and positive; clearance functions on two subsets of the boundary curves are computed and then merged to reect the coexistence of the two subsets. For a multiply-connected region, the clearance function on the outer loop is rst computed and then synchronized with those on the inner loops. This methodology generalizes the approaches by Lee [35], Srinivasan [62], and Chou [14] to compute clearance functions in 2D domain. The proposed approach takes O (|| log ||) to construct individual clearance functions of contour curves. Each synchronization procedure among distinct loops takes linear time with respect to the length of the inner contour. Therefore to construct the clearance function for a 2D compact region with H holes takes O (LlogL + LH ) in time, where L is the total arc length of all boundaries. The storage requirement for the proposed approach is linear in L since only a set of scalars need to be stored as opposed to medial axis point location. Even though time complexity is not signicantly dierent from Lees and Shrinivasans algorithms, the proposed approach exhibits many other advantages: First, there is no need to maintain the graph structures throughout the algorithm. Updating graph structures during MAT construction can be error-prone and requires careful implementation. With the proposed representation, a relatively simple linked list can be utilized to record the inmum of piecewise bisecting functions that represent the clearance functions. Second, associativity from boundary points to their medial axis transform is directly maintained, which is essential to many of our process planning applications to be described in the rest of the thesis. Associativity in the clearance function reduces the overhead of searching the corresponding medial axis point and the associated clearance information from the graph-based representation of MAT. Third, the proposed approach requires to identify the intersection between the existing clearance function. This can be accomplished by computing the zeros
74
of two functions. Since for a 2D compact region the clearance function maps a point in 1D parametric space to a scalar value, the intersection can be computed more eciently than the curve-curve intersection in 2D space. Fourth, the approach handles 2D compact regions bounded by nonlinear curves with multiple holes. The boundary curves can be connected tangently or piecewise smooth as we will see in the next section. In addition, it is applicable to both simply- and multiply-connected polygons. Finally, the representation of clearance functions is very concise in conjunction with the boundary representation of an input object. The Voronoi diagrams or medial axis transform can be easily extracted from the clearance functions. The disadvantage of the proposed approach is that one would need to convert the clearance function together with the contour geometry to construct the medial axis. However, this can be done trivially, since in our representation all bisecting functions are labeled with their dening boundary points and geometry of the medial axis can be described in terms of the clearance function (Proposition 4.5). In addition, topology of the medial axis is readily available in our parametric and associative representation. Now we turn our attention to 2D compact regions bounded by curvilinear polygons (i.e., polygons with linear and circular arc segments).
4.4
Extension to Generalized Curvilinear Polygons
The method discussed in previous sections assumes that the boundaries of 2D compact regions are at least G1 - and piecewise C 2 -continuous, and have strict local maxima with positive curvatures. This, however, does not limit its applicability to polygons or generalized curvilinear polygons (i.e., polygons consisting of circular arcs or linear segments). In these cases, boundaries are piecewise C 2 -continuous with G1 -continuous joints (when adjacent segments are tangently connected) or non-G1 -continuous joints (when tangents are discontinuous.) Furthermore, the convex circular arcs have nonstrict local maxima of positive curvatures. We would need to modify the proposed method to accommodate these special cases.
75
First, consider the following: Non-G1 -continuous joints: When the boundary consists of non-G1 -continuous joints (i.e., sharp corners), the normal directions are discontinuous in the neighborhood of these joints. Since our approach is based on continuity of the bisecting functions and clearance functions, the boundaries and their normals need to be continuous as well. To accomplish this, we replace these sharp corners with innitesimal circular arcs, tangently joined with their neighboring entities. As a result, boundaries are at least G1 -continuous and the normals are uniquely dened at every boundary point (see Figure 4.11). In practice, we parameterize linear segments with their arc lengths, and sharp corners or circular arc segments with their angular lengths. Non-strict positive local maxima of curvatures: This occurs when the portion of boundary is a convex circular arc. In this case, bisecting distances are dened with the same values for any pair of points on the arc. When these bisecting distances are also on the clearance function, it would confuse the tracing process since multiple boundary points are associated with the same bisecting function value. For this reason, we assign pairs symmetrically to dene unique pairing. In other words, we pick a middle point on the arc as the knot, and pair a point on the left of this knot with a point on the right such that the angular lengths from these two points to the knot are equal. Now degenerate boundaries have been handled. We shall see how these eect computation of clearance functions. Overall speaking, the procedure to computing the clearance functions are the same except that initialization of clearance functions has to deal with convex circular arcs, and that tracing steps can be performed more eciently with these entities. Initializing clearance functions: Since we model the non-strict local positive maxima of curvatures as a strict local maximum, we would need to update the clearance function accordingly. When initializing the clearance functions of an interval without interior knots,
76
Figure 4.11: Extension of the proposed approach to generalized curvilinear polygons.
77
we assign an innity value to all boundary points since no two boundary points in this interval dene a valid bisecting distance. This is no longer the case when the boundary consists of portion of a convex circular arc, where any two points on the arc has a bisecting distance equal to the radius of the arc. In this case, we initialize the clearance function values associated with the arc to be its radius. Tracing clearance functions ( Steps 5-6 of Algorithm 4.2 and Steps 3-4 of Algorithm 4.3): Tracing is achieved by proceeding the boundary points incrementally. Depending on accuracy pursued and types of boundary entities encountered, this process can be very inecient. With only linear and circular arc segments on the boundary, we could instead step through these entities in the order they connect. Since there exist analytical solutions of bisecting distances between any pair of lines and arcs, such tracing is very eective. Constructing clearance functions for generalized curvilinear polygons is more efcient than for smooth 2D compact regions. To take advantages of eciency, we shall approximate the nonlinear boundary entities with tangently continuous bi-arc splines [29]. Such approximation not only maintains the rst-order smoothness of nonlinear boundaries but also reduces complexity of describing nonlinear entities within acceptable accuracy. In addition, it reduces computation time in constructing the clearance functions. In short, the benets include: Easier identication of knots: The curvature of a linear segment is zero whereas that of an arc equals to its radius. The local maxima of positive curvatures correspond to radii of convex arcs. More ecient tracing: Tracing steps involve advance of segments, not increments of parameters. Faster computation time: Computation is faster since there are analytical solutions for computing bisecting distances between segments. Furthermore, computation complexity now becomes O (N log N +hN ) where N is the total number of segments and h is the number of holes.
78
More practical applications: Many 2D engineering designs consist of circular arcs and linear segments. When nonlinear curves are present, they can be approximated by bi-arcs very eciently and robustly. It should be noted that the algorithm is applicable to both smooth nonlinear compact regions and generalized curvilinear polygons. Furthermore, methodology of utilizing clearance functions to describe medial axis transform is also suitable for computing MAT of 3D solids. It is an open question though how tracing processes can be performed eciently in three dimensions.
4.5
Examples
Four examples are shown in this section. The rst example (Figure 4.12 and Figure 4.13) shows the clearance function and the medial axis for a rectangular region. The boundary of this region consists of four knots (i.e., at four sharp corners). The whole boundary rst gets split into two subsets: [s0 , s2 ] and [s2 , s4 ]. The clearance function for the subset [s0 , s2 ] is computed (Step 1). Tracing of this subset terminates as soon as it hits the end of the left curve (from s1 left to s0 ) or the right curve (from s1 right to s2 ). Similarly, the clearance function for the subset [s2 , s4 ] can be constructed. The Step 3 merges the two subsets at s2 . The arrows in the gure indicate the boundary curves that have been traversed. The solid arrows denote that the clearance function on those segments are updated; the dashed arrows denote that the clearance values remain unchanged after merging. The merging process terminates when tracing meets the end points (s0 or s4 ). The resultant clearance function is shown on the boundary of the region (Figure 4.13). The medial axis is revealed by folding the clearance face onto the 2D plane. The second example (Figure 4.14) presents the clearance function for a smooth curved region. The boundary curve is approximated by tangently continuous bi-arc splines [29]. The rst step of computation initializes the clearance values of convex circular arcs to be their radii. The next two steps compute the clearance function of the left and right subsets. The remaining steps merge the two subsets and complete tracing of the clearance function. The result is shown on the right.
79
s0 s4
s3
s1 Step 1: C
s2
s0 Step 2:
s1
s2
s3
s4
s0 Step 3:
s1
s2
s3
s4
s0
s1
s2
s3
s4
s0
s1
s2
s3
s4
s0
s1
s2
s3
s4
Figure 4.12: Computation of the clearance function for a rectangular region. Step 1 computes the clearance function in [s0 , s2 ]. Step 2 computes the clearance function in [s2 , s4 ]. Step 3 merges the two subsets and updates the clearance metrics in [s0 , s4 ].
80
Figure 4.13: Visualization of the clearance function on a rectangular region. On the top, the clearance function is plotted in the direction perpendicular to the input region. On the bottom, the clearance function is drawn along the normals of the boundary; the trajectory of the clearance function curve represents the medial axis.
81
Figure 4.14: Computation of the clearance function for a smooth curved region. The left gures show a sequence (from top to bottom) of intermediate results in computing the clearance function for the smooth region shown on the right. The x-axis represents a boundary parameterization and the y-axis denotes the clearance values. The resulting clearance function is plotted in the direction perpendicular to the region.
82
(a)
(b)
(d)
(e)
(c)
(f)
Figure 4.15: Clearance functions for a smooth region with holes. Figure (a) shows a multiply-connected region bounded by smooth curves. Figure (b) to Figure (f) show intermediate results of clearance function computation by incrementally inserting an inner loop and updating the existing clearance functions.
83
Figure 4.16: The clearance functions and medial axes for a 2D domain with curvilinear boundaries. The top gure shows the clearance function associated with the boundary of the region. The bottom gure shows the medial axis extracted from the clearance function.
84
The third example (Figure 4.15) demonstrates how the clearance functions of a multiply-connected region is constructed. The boundary of the region consists of 5 cubic B-splines and is approximated by 36 G1 -continuous circular arcs [29]. The clearance function is computed in 0.03 second (CPU time) on a SUN workstation running a 295-MHz UltraSPARC-II CPU. The nal gure (Figure 4.16) computes the clearance functions and the medial axes of a cross section of an injection molding insert shown in Figure 2.7. The medial axes constitutes many branches due to existence of many sharp corners. The clearance function is computed in 0.02 second (CPU time) on the same machine mentioned above.
4.6
This chapter presents an approach based on clearance functions associated with object boundary to compute the 2D medial axis transform. The clearance function records clearance, radius of the maximal inscribed ball (or disk) contacting a boundary point, to the boundary. This clearance function, together with geometry of object boundary, denes the medial axis transform of an object. The clearance function is the inmum of a set of bisecting distances among all pairs of boundary points. To eciently compute such inmum, we utilize a divideand-conquer methodology. The clearance functions of two subsets of boundary are individually computed and merged. In the merging process, a point on the new clearance function is rst identied, and the inmum function is traced simultaneously along the two sets of boundary. The proposed algorithm applies to arbitrarily smooth non-linear domains, or piecewise curvilinear polygons. It deals with both simple (domains without holes) and multiply-connected regions (domains with holes). The concept of clearance functions can be employed in three-dimensional domains. Eciency of such computation relies on eective merging procedures. The approach presented in this chapter utilizes the divide-and-conquer methodology proposed in [35], and merging of multiply-connected polygons suggested in [62].
85
The fundamental dierence is that we operate such computation in a dierent domain, that is, the clearance function domain. In addition, the proposed approach exhibits several advantages. First, relatively simple data structure, linked list, is employed, as opposed to graph structures. Second, associativity from boundary points to the medial axes is directly maintained; no explicit computation is necessary to identify clearance values associated with a boundary point. Third, clearance functions map a 1D boundary curve to scalar values; the intersection of two functions can be computed more eciently than intersection of two curves in 2D. Finally, representation of clearance functions based on existing boundary representation is more concise and practical for many engineering applications. The medial axis transform can be easily converted from the clearance functions and geometry of boundary. In the next chapters, we shall present approaches to tackle three of the challenging planning tasks encountered in additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication.
Chapter 5 Manufacturability Analysis for Decomposition

5.1 Introduction
Manufacturability analysis has been extensively studied [22] for various manufacturing processes such as assembly, machining, and injection molding. The goal of this analysis is to determine how dicult, if not impossible, a designed part can be fabricated. A part is manufacturable if a physical object can be built in compliance with the design and part specication. Since additive/subtractive SFF decomposes a 3D object into sub-entities (referred to as compacts in [39]), it would mean that each compact has to be manufacturable, and furthermore, the composition of the compacts does not alter the shapes or material integrity of previously built compacts. In purely additive SFF, such compacts correspond to layers or slices with a processdependent thickness. The parts produced from this class of processes exhibit a wellknown stair-step eect. To analyze the part accuracy with respect to build orientations, Arni and Gupta [3] proposed a manufacturability analysis tool based on facet representation of objects. They derived the relationships between surface deviations and build orientations for each facet. The facets that can be fabricated with the specied tolerance are then projected onto a unit sphere according to their normal 86
CHAPTER 5. MANUFACTURABILITY ANALYSIS FOR DECOMPOSITION 87
directions. By nding a common intersection area on this unit sphere, a set of acceptable build orientations can be determined that guarantee the part can be built within the user-dened tolerance. If such intersection can not be found, the part is not manufacturable. In additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication, 3D solids are decomposed into a number of sub-entities, each of which is then built incrementally. This is in the hope to resolve various manufacturability problems imposed by process constraints by a means of decomposition. Therefore, manufacturability analysis for additive/subtractive SFF could not be conveyed without knowledge of decomposition characteristics. To assess manufacturability of a particular decomposition solution, we need to evaluate geometry of the new component to be built and its relation with the built geometry at each build stage. Various process and material constraints could pose problems in fabricating a complete part. For examples, casting viscous materials into small thin cavities or depositing materials into internal sharp regions often results in voids. Machining narrow regions or building a thin tall walls is usually dicult and may not be possible. In this chapter, we shall identify narrow or inaccessible machining regions to evaluate manufacturability of a given part build plan. This chapter answers the following question: Given a 3D model and its build orientation, can we nd a feasible decomposition plan that results in a manufacturable build sequence for intermediate machining operations? To simplify the problem, we assume: Material deposition does not alter the shape of built compacts; the shaped compacts may change its dimension in a later stage due to built-in residual stresses resulting from material deposition. We assume such phenomenon can be controlled from the process perspectives. Three-axis machining is employed for shaping individual compacts. The build direction is in line with the z-axis of the machine.
Flat-end mills are the only type of cutters considered. The smallest radius of such cutters is known. In this chapter, we attempt to evaluate manufacturability of a given decomposition plan for additive/subtractive SFF. In order to better understand the eect of decomposition on manufacturability, we briey summarize the principle of decomposition in Section 5.2. We review some of the related work in Section 5.3. We then describe an approach based on the proposed clearance function representation (Section 5.4) to determine manufacturability of a 2D machining region and to identify the surfaces that pose manufacturability problems. This is followed by a strategy of utilizing such a technique to analyze feasibility of 3D decomposition that permits cutting tool access (Section 5.5).
5.2
Overview of Part Decomposition
To understand the eects of part decomposition on manufacturability of parts, we shall provide an overview of part decomposition methodology and discuss characteristics of decomposed compacts. Part decomposition in additive/subtractive SFF aims at subdividing a part model into smaller, simpler, and manufacturable components. Each of these components is then built in sequence to construct a complete object. This class of processes also utilizes sacricial materials to support overhanging features of a decomposed entity so that change of build orientations and custom xtures are not necessary. Since these support structures are built in alternation with decomposed part components, part decomposition modules usually also generate support structures to guarantee that decomposed parts can be built. Merz [39] referred such decomposed part models and support structures as compacts. Note that the compact not only satises the mathematical denition of compactness (being closed and bounded), but also meets the following manufacturing criteria: (see Figure 2.3) Materials in a compact can be deposited from above with respect to the build
direction. Downward-facing features of a compact is replicated by depositing materials on previously shaped compacts. All upward-facing surfaces can be shaped from above with respect to the build direction. Vertical surfaces can be produced either by casting materials onto previously built compact, or by shaping processes. According to this denition, Ramaswami [54] proposed an algorithm to automatically decompose an object into compacts. In this approach, he identies all the silhouette edges on the part surfaces with respect to a pre-determined build direction. A collection of these silhouette edges along with existing part edges form a loop. With the help of several sweeping operations of the loops along the build direction, models are then split and support structures are generated. Binnard [5], on the other hand, proposed a knowledge-based system that allows designers to build objects from primitives with built-in manufacturing plans. In his approach, a sequenced list of valid compacts is associated with each primitive. When primitives are combined to create new designs, the associated lists of compacts are merged to represent a new sequence of compacts for the resulting object. Nevertheless, the above two approaches may result in sharp internal corners or small cavities in the compacts. Such features are dicult or impossible to be shaped with common material removal processes. Note that the decomposition algorithms guarantee the accessibility from the top with respect to the build direction, provided that arbitrarily small features can be shaped. Furthermore, multiple, or innitely many, compact decomposition solutions exist, as any compact can be further decomposed to a set of sub-compacts that still represent valid compacts. In addition, a set of valid compacts could be sequenced in a dierent order to represent various build strategies. Manufacturability analysis is therefore essential to guarantee that the produced compact lists and their sequences constitute a manufacturable plan.
Figure 5.1: A simple turning wheel assembly. The top of the gure shows the shaded and wireframe models of the shaft and the wheel. The assembled mechanism is to be built in additive/subtractive SFF.
Figure 5.2: A compact decomposition solution to the turning wheel assembly. Single arrows denote the precedence relationship between compacts (i.e., compacts must be built in the specied order.) Double arrows denote the adjacency relationship (i.e., compacts can be built in either order.)
1. (A)
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
1. (B)
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
: sacrificial (support) material : part material
Figure 5.3: Two possible build sequences of a simple turning wheel mechanism. These two sequences dier in Steps 4 and 5. The rst plan builds the sacricial material between the shaft and the wheel in Step 4. The second plan builds the wheel rst and then the sacricial material.
1. (A)
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
1. (B)
2.
3.
4. d
5.
6.
7.
: sacrificial (support) material : part material
: cutting tool
Figure 5.4: Manufacturability of two build sequences of a simple turning wheel mechanism. The second build plan presents diculties in machining the groove (the width of the groove d is smaller than the cutter diameter), whereas the rst plan goes around the problem by building the same part with a dierent build sequence. Figure 5.1 shows a simple rotating wheel assembly. A solution to the compact decomposition of this part is shown in Figure 5.2. Figure 5.3 presents two possible build sequences. However, only the rst build plan is manufacturable with the given cutting tool (Figure 5.4), since the second plan creates a small groove between the shaft and the turning wheel. A manufacturability tool is intended to facilitate selection of a feasible build sequence from many alternatives.
5.3
Related Work
Our goal is to determine whether a part decomposition plan constitutes a manufacturable sequence for machining operations. Several literatures on analyzing manufacturability of machined parts can be found. Cutkosky and Tenenbaum [16] developed a framework to support concurrent product and process design. Designers work in manufacturing modes, adding design features and assigning process plan simultaneously. The manufacturability is assured in the design stage since designs are associated with feasible manufacturing plans for
the intended fabrication method and facility. Anjanappa et al. [1, 30] proposed a feature extraction and evaluation system to analyze manufacturability of part features against available tools, machines, and xtures. If features match the specic setups such as cutting tools and xtures, they are considered manufacturable, and instructions for machining those features are generated. If no match is found, the part is not manufacturable. Such an analysis tool requires extensive computation on extracting and matching machining features to evaluate manufacturability. In addition, this approach is limited to non-interacted features; interaction between features often complicates feature extraction tasks, and valid features may not be found even if they exist. Gupta et al. [21] presented a manufacturability analysis methodology for prismatic machining components based on evaluation of machining operations. Various operation plans for machining a part are generated and evaluated against the designed shapes and tolerances. If no operation plans are found that match the designed characteristics, the part is non-manufacturable. If multiple solutions are found, the best plan (in terms of machining time) is selected. To evaluate feasibility of part decomposition for additive/subtractive SFF, these approaches are not directly applicable. The reasons are as follows. First, to ensure that part decomposition represents a manufacturable build sequence, the part is best designed in the compact level: designers create compacts and assign process plans to them. However, such design may not be intuitive and require users with comprehensive knowledge on the process. In addition, due to iterative build characteristic, such a design process can be tedious. Although Binnard and Cutkosky [5] attempt to alleviate such compact-level design by a composition method, the resulting composition plans still demand manufacturability evaluation since merging of manufacturable primitives may result in non-manufacturable compacts. Second, processes in additive/subtractive SFF are constrained to xed build orientations. Special setups or xtures are not required. Furthermore, when only a 3-axis milling facility is considered, machining features are always associated with the build direction. Therefore, dicult feature extraction or xturing problems can be avoided.
Finally, a generate-and-test approach for manufacturability analysis is not practical in additive/subtractive SFF, since parts are built in multiple cycles. As designs become complicated, the number of compacts and the combinatorial number of build sequences could compound the computational diculties. In this thesis, we propose a feature-free manufacturability analysis methodology to evaluate a given decomposition plan without generating machining instructions. This tool is intended to assist both Ramaswamis decomposition algorithm and Binnards design-by-composition approach to identify a feasible build plan. The proposed manufacturability analysis approach is based on the clearance function representation. It is also applicable to machining operations involving a 3-axis mill and at-end cutting tools.
5.4
Manufacturability Analysis with a 2D Medial Axis Transform
In this section, we propose approaches to perform manufacturability analysis in 2D domain. We wish to determine whether materials in a 2D region can be completely removed with a given cutting tool. If materials can not be completely machined due to tool accessibility, we would like to identify those unnished region. The following denitions and lemmas provide basics to identify such unnished regions, without explicitly computing the tool paths. Denition 5.1 (R-Sweepable) A region A is r -sweepable if the region A can be represented as union of disks Dr with radii r . In other words, A is r -sweepable if there exist a set of Dr such that A= Dr
Now, we would like to identify whether a 2D region is r -sweepable via its medial axis disks:
Lemma 5.2 (R-Sweepable Region) A region A is r -sweepable if all of its medial axis disks have radii larger than r . Proof. By denition, a region A can be represented as union of all of its medial axis disks. In addition, any disk with radius larger than r can also be represented as union of many disks with radius r . Therefore, such a region A can be completely swept by a given disk with radius r .
Lemma 5.3 (Non-R-Sweepable Region) A region A is not r -sweepable if there exists a medial axis disk D M with radius smaller than r (Figure 5.5). Proof. From denition of MAT, a region A can be represented as union of its medial axis disks, each of which is mutually exclusive.
M M A = {k Dk | Di M Dj for i = j }
Since all medial axis disks are mutually exclusive, there exists at least one point p in
M a medial axis disk Di such that p does not belong to any other medial axis disks.
In other words, we can nd a point p A such that p falls outside the union of all
other medial axis disks that are r -sweepable.
From the above lemma, we know that there exists a point in a medial axis disk with radius smaller than r that is not sweepable by any Dr inside the region. A collection of such non-r -sweepable points constitute the unsweepable geometry. By the same token, a at-end cutting tool, represented as a 2D disk with radius , is not able to sweep or remove these non- -sweepable regions. These regions therefore are the uncut regions, or inaccessible regions for the given cutter.
: medial disk smaller than Dr . Figure 5.5: A non-r -sweepable region. The region contains medial axis disks with radii smaller than r . Depending upon levels of interests in describing inaccessible regions given a cutting tool, the following entities could be identied: Inaccessible boundaries that induce tool access diculty: Inaccessible boundaries P are a subset of boundaries associated with points in the inaccessible regions. From Lemma 5.3 these points are associated with medial axis disks whose radii are smaller than . Our tasks is to locate the subset of boundaries whose medial axis disks have radii smaller than . Furthermore, since clearance values at boundary points are the radii of their associated medial axis disks, we could identify the inaccessible boundaries by searching for boundary points P whose clearance values are smaller than : (Figure 5.6) P = { (s ) | C (s ) < } Wedges bounded by inaccessible boundaries and medial axes: We dene the wedge geometry W to be the areas bounded by inaccessible boundaries and the associated medial axis. Such regions enclose all unmachined points but may also contain some machinable regions. However, it is useful in describing approximated unmachined geometry since such computation is inexpensive compared with the task of identifying exact unmachined regions.
: P C (s )
s Figure 5.6: Computing inaccessible boundaries of a region. The inaccessible boundaries corresponding to a at-end mill with radius are those with clearance function values smaller than .
: W C (s )
s Figure 5.7: Computing the inaccessible wedges for manufacturability analysis. The wedges associated with inaccessible boundaries and medial axes are shown in hatched regions. The exact unmachined regions are those subtracting the areas of the medial axis disks at end points of the inaccessible boundaries. The corresponding unmachined wedge W is dened as (Figure 5.7) W = {p | p = (s) + d n(s), 0 d C (s), C (s) < } Exact unmachined geometry To compute the exact unmachined geometry U , we subtract the medial axis disks at end points of the inaccessible boundaries from the wedge geometry. Let S be a continuous subset of inaccessible boundaries, S [sa , sb ],
U = {p | p = (s) + d n(s), p / Dr ( s a ) , p / Dr ( s b ) , 0 d C ( s ) }
In general, existence of inaccessible boundaries provides hints on whether the
given region can be completely machined with the given cutting tool, and on where the boundaries needs to be modied to achieve manufacturability. On the other hand, the wedges enclose the areas where residuals of materials could exist. Both inaccessible boundaries and wedges provide quick and computationally inexpensive ways to locate the areas with tool access diculties.
5.5
Manufacturability Analysis for Part Decomposition
In this section, we will discuss approaches to analyzing manufacturability of a build sequence, represented by a list of decomposed compacts. As pointed out in the previous sections, we assume that a 3-axis CNC machine is employed and at-end mills are the only type of cutters considered. Given a list of compacts, {C1 , C2 , , Cn }, we dene a stage geometry at the i-th build step to be Si =
j<i
Cj
The stage geometry reects the shapes already produced before a new compact built. For examples, the objects shown in Figure 5.3 denote various stage geometries, whereas the individual compacts are shown in Figure 5.2. We assume that any portion of the compacts will not be re-machined after built at their rst times, although the iterative nature of additive/subtractive SFF processes allows such exibility. In other words, we assume that no portion of the stage geometry can be destroyed later during the build processes. Based on this assumption, machining a compact surface should avoid interfering with any portion of the stage geometry. Given a compact Ci and the stage geometry Si , we wish to determine whether Ci is manufacturable in the presence of Si . To accomplish this, we compute the delta volume of the compact and stage geometry, and then analyze accessibility of the
CHAPTER 5. MANUFACTURABILITY ANALYSIS FOR DECOMPOSITION100
cutter within the delta volume. The following details this approach: Step 1: Generate the delta volume. In conventional machining, delta volume is dened as the volume of stock material subtracted by the workpiece. This volume reects the region that should be removed after shaping processes. In the context of additive/subtractive SFF, materials to be removed are usually of limited amount and are located nearby the workpiece surfaces due to the near-net shape deposition process. As a result, the delta volume could have an arbitrarily complex shape. To facilitate computation, we refer delta volume to be the region that should be cleared or emptied after material removal processes. A realistic variant of this denition would be the volume of a suciently large bounding box subtracted by the workpiece. By suciently large bounding box we refer to the largest volume inside a workspace. We shall use this denition throughout this chapter. Step 2: Slice the delta volume. To utilize directionality of additive/subtractive SFF and ease computation of 2D MAT, we shall slice the 3D delta volume into an adequate amount of thin slices perpendicular to the build direction. For examples, a few slices would suce for a prismatic part, but an object composed of highly smooth surfaces may require a relatively large number of slices for more accurate representation. Flat faces are sliced to line segments whereas nonlinear surfaces are approximated by circular arc or bi-arc segments [29]. This makes the clearance function computation more eciently. Once a slice is generated, its edges are labeled with the associated surfaces on the compact Ci . Individual surfaces are also recorded with all the produced edges on the slices. This bi-directional reference allows us to retrieve information regarding which surfaces on the compact result in manufacturability problems,
and where on the surfaces need to be modied to accommodate manufacturing processes. Step 3: Generate clearance functions for each slice. Each slicing operation may result in many disconnected regions. We generate clearance functions for boundaries of each region. Step 4: Identify inaccessible regions for each slice. Once the MAT clearance functions are computed for each slice, the regions whose clearance values are smaller than are identied 5.4. These regions corresponds to areas that are not accessible by a at-end cutter with radius . If no such inaccessible areas exist, the compact Ci is manufacturable. We perform such manufacturability analysis for each compact Ci with respect to the corresponding stage geometry Si to determine if a build sequence C1 , C2 , , Cn is feasible for fabrication. The following summarizes the analysis procedure: Algorithm 5.1 (IdentifyManufacturability) Input: , {C0 , C1 , . . . , Cm } Output: Manufacturability and unmachined surface areas 1. for i = 1 to m 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Si = Ck
k<i
Generate delta volume of Si Ci Slice delta volume of Si Ci for each slice in delta volume of Si Ci Compute clearance functions Cj Identify inaccessible boundaries Pj, if (Pj, = ) Report non-manufacturability. end for
11. end for
Stage geometry Compact geometry
Step 1:
Step 2:
slices
Step 3 & 4:
inaccessible boundary (highlighted)

Result:
Figure 5.8: Manufacturability analysis procedures for constructing a turning wheel assembly with additive/subtractive SFF. The top gure presents a stage geometry shown in Step 4 of the second build sequence in Figure 5.4. The geometry of the compact at this stage is a thin hollow cylinder. The delta volume of the united geometry is rst computed (Step 1), and sliced (Step 2). The clearance functions of all slices are computed, and the inaccessible surfaces are then identied (Step 3 & 4).
If this procedure is only used for evaluating manufacturability (but not for identifying surfaces areas posing the machining problems), the procedure could stop in Step 9 when any inaccessible boundaries are found. Figure 5.8 shows an example of evaluating manufacturability of the turning wheel mechanism.
5.6
Examples
Three examples are presented in this section. Figure 5.9 shows a part composed of two cones and a tilted cylinder. The part is decomposed to three part compacts and four support compacts via Ramaswamis algorithm [54]. The part is to be built in a sequence denoted by the numbers in the gure. We apply the proposed manufacturability analysis procedure at the Step 6, where the support structure of the tilted cylinder has just been built. The lines in the bottom gure show the areas of sharp corners that have machining diculties with the given cutter size. Note that in this particular example, the unmachined regions are associated with the sacricial support material. Even if the cutting tool gouges into this sacricial compact, it will not destroy the part geometry or prevent the subsequent layers from being built correctly. The result from the manufacturability analysis needs to be further processed to take into account this factor. Figure 5.10 shows an intermediate step of building a link component. The part is decomposed via Binnards composition approach [5]. In this example, the support structure has been built to support the part compact. However, the part compact itself can not be accurately machined to its designed shape due to presence of a sharp corner. The last gure (Figure 5.11) shows the nal step of building an injection molding inserts [19]. This part consists of internal cooling channels that conform the shape of the molding part, and an embedded copper deposit to facilitate heat transfer during molding cycles. However, many sharp edges and small cavities prevent it from being completed with the given at-end mill. The inaccessible regions were identied for electrical discharge machining (EDM) operations.
7. 6.
5.
3. 4.
1.
2.
part
part compacts
support compacts
6.
5. cutter
unmachinable region
Figure 5.9: A decomposition example and its manufacturability. The top gures show the decomposition result and a build sequence for the given part. The bottom gure shows the analysis result for the compact and stage geometry at Step 6. The Compacts 14 are not shown in this gure.
part
part material
unmachinable regions support material
cutter
Figure 5.10: A link component and its manufacturability. The top gure shows a link component. The bottom shows unmachined areas of a compact.
unmachinable regions
cutter
Figure 5.11: An injection molding insert and its manufacturability. The nal step of the build process is shown. The unmachined areas are identied.
5.7
We proposed a feature-free manufacturability analysis methodology to assist part decomposition for additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication. The part is decomposed such that materials can be deposited from the top with respect to the build direction. The downward-facing surfaces are formed by material deposition onto previously shaped materials, whereas upward-facing surfaces are shaped by material removal operations. The proposed manufacturability analysis tool helps identify whether all upward-facing surfaces of the decomposed components are machinable with the designated machining process. The approach is based on 2D medial axis transform. We assume a 3-axis mill and at-end tools are employed for the material removal operation. We rst generate delta volume of the decomposed model and the previously built geometry. This delta volume is sliced perpendicularly to the build direction. The medial axis transform of each slice is then computed and evaluated against the smallest available tool size. Since in our proposed MAT representation, dimensional metrics are associated with object boundaries, we can directly identify the surface areas that represent machining diculty, and determine which surfaces may be gouged if we were to machine those surfaces. The proposed approach utilizes directionality of the solid freeform fabrication processes, and eliminates consideration of xturing problems since all overhanging features are supported by sacricial materials. Although our approach takes advantages of this simplicity, we believe that it can be employed to facilitate manufacturability analysis for more complicated manufacturing processes such as conventional machining, casting or electrical discharge machining.
Chapter 6 Path Planning for Material Deposition

The quality of material produced by solid freeform fabrication is closely related to topology and fairness of deposition paths. A poorly planned path often results in voids or gaps between adjacent passes or layers. However, there are virtually no solutions for producing a completely smooth and connected spiral path that lls an arbitrary cross section. In this chapter, we relax the constraints of cross-sectional geometry and propose a shape optimization algorithm based on the medial axis transform. The shape is optimized such that high-quality spiral deposition paths can be produced. The resulting paths are computed based on the medial axis, as opposed to common recursiveosetting approaches.
6.1
Introduction
A basic constituent of solid freeform fabrication (SFF) is the iterative build process. In purely additive SFF processes, an object is decomposed into 2D planar layers, and each layer is stacked on top of the others to construct an approximated 2 1/2 D object. Additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication, on the other hand, oers non-planar 3D layer decomposition where decomposed subcomponents are iteratively 107
CHAPTER 6. PATH PLANNING FOR MATERIAL DEPOSITION
108
Figure 6.1: Common deposition patterns: raster pattern (left), and contour-parallel pattern (right). built and shaped. Each subcomponent is in turn sliced into multiple 2D layers for material deposition and then shaped as a whole in a 3D manner. To deposit materials, a deposition head is guided to traverse the pre-computed deposition paths. Common patterns for generating deposition paths include raster patterns paths are parallel to a pre-determined direction, and spiral patterns (also known as contour-parallel patterns) paths are parallel to contours of geometry (Figure 6.1). For extrusion-based deposition processes, spiral path patterns are often preferred for producing isotropic deposits. One of the spiral path generation techniques is to oset the boundary curves recursively toward its interior. Adjacent oset curves are then connected or interpolated to produce a continuous contour-parallel deposition path. However, this recursive-oset approach presents several problems: (Figure 6.2) Existence of gaps: Paths generated by recursive-oset approaches do not guarantee to ll a 2D region completely. This is because when a 2D region entails a sharp internal corner, portions of oset curves are trimmed to account for self-intersection. Such trimming results in rounding of the swept trajectory, and consequently gaps are generated. Non-smoothness of paths: An originally smooth boundary could result in oset curves with many sharp corners due to trimming processes. Because of physical limitation, traversing paths around sharp corners can not be performed at a constant speed. As a
109
sharp corner sharp corners
broken offset curve
the offset curves
Gaps due to diminished offset curves
Gaps due to sharp corners
predicted results
Figure 6.2: Problems produced by recursively osetting algorithms. Special strategies (reducing step-over distances, revisiting the gaps in a later stage, etc.) have to be taken to ensure that gaps are lled.
110
result, at sharp corners materials are accumulated (in case of extrusion-based deposition), or overheated (in case of solidication-based deposition), resulting in exceeding thermal stresses. Disconnectedness of paths: Osetting a closed curve could result in multiple disconnected oset entities. As a result, smooth transition from one oset curve to another is not possible without requiring additional retraction and re-entrance. For extrusion-based deposition processes, such retraction and re-entrance signicantly aect material integrity. In CNC pocket machining, these problems are tackled by reducing distances between adjacent passes, and by generating extra branches to reach the gaps. On the other hand, path disconnectedness is dealt with by retracting the cutting tool and re-engaging it with the material at a new start point. For the purpose of material deposition, however, these solutions are not satisfactory. Excess materials can be accumulated sparsely, depending on topology of deposition paths and distances between adjacent passes. Traversing extra branches causes many tool retractions and re-entrances during deposition. Moreover, smoothness of deposition paths is not addressed by any of the strategies used to generate machine tool paths. In this chapter, we propose a new methodology to produce better-quality 2D spiral deposition paths for additive/subtractive SFF. In our approach, problems of gaps and path disconnectedness are minimized by relaxing the 2D layer geometry. Smooth paths are then generated from this relaxed geometry. Although excess deposits are produced outside the target areas, they can be shaped via the shaping procedures in additive/subtractive SFF.
6.2
Proposed Approaches
To overcome problems imposed by oset approaches, a geometry manipulation technique (Figure 6.3) is proposed to accommodate the desired path pattern. In this
111
2D geometry
shape optimization algorithm
optimized geometry
recursive offsetting
spiral path generation
spiral path
Figure 6.3: Proposed deposition path planning methodology. A common spiral path generation approach is based on the recursive-oset algorithm. We propose to relax the cross-sectional geometry from which we generate deposition paths.
112
technique, 2D layer shapes are rst relaxed (unconstrained) and optimized such that the generated spiral paths produce no or a minimal number of undesired features such as gaps or path discontinuities. The optimized geometry, however, must enclose the original layer geometry to ensure complete material deposition. To formulate this layer geometry optimization problem, let A0 be a 2D compact (closed and bounded) region where material is to be deposited. A naive approach that may reduce the amount of sharp turns in the deposition paths is to make smooth the boundary A of the region A. We let the optimized geometry be A. Our goal is to minimize the amount of excess material that needs to be deposited, subject to boundary smoothness constraints and the enclosedness of the deposition region:
minimize
A
area(A) area(A0 ) A0 A A is C 1 continuous
subject to
However, solving the above problem is dicult in that computation of enclosedness (A0 A) is required. Moreover, the formulation only guarantees the boundary of the new region to be C 1 -continuous, but makes no arguments on how C 1 continuities of oset curves can be maintained. Oset curves could be broken into pieces if, for example, a bottleneck feature is present in A. In general, this formulation brings up great complexity when considering all of the issues (connected, smooth C 1 -continuous oset curves). Two simple solutions to the above problem are to use the convex hull approximation and the ellipse hull approximation. The former uses the smallest convex polygon and the latter uses the smallest ellipse for the optimized shape. Both of these approaches produce connected oset curves due to convexity of the resulting shapes, and optimal shapes can be computed very eciently (ellipse hull computation involves solving a convex optimization problem, while convex hull can be computed in O(nlogn) for polygons with n edges). However, the oset paths of a convex/ellipse gure are not necessary C 1 -continuous. Moreover, strategies of depositing materials
113
on convex or ellipse hulls are ecient only when original geometry is near convex, in other words, when the dierence between the original area and its convex/ellipse hull is small. We shall introduce a new approach based on medial axis transform, or skeletons, to optimize the cross-sectional geometry so that a connected, smooth deposition path could be produced from the optimized geometry with the least amount of excess deposits. The next sections detail such an approach. But rst, we shall examine how deposition paths can be generated from the medial axis transform.
6.3
Deposition Paths of Prescribed Geometry
For convenience, we shall dene a special type of MAT, the simple MAT (Figure 6.4), which consists of exactly two end points and no branch points. An MAT that satises this condition allows us to easily evaluate and represent its boundary curve. Denition 6.1 A simple MAT is an MAT that consists of only two end MA points and no branch points. Each of the disks associated with these normal points touches the boundary at exactly two points. We shall discuss approaches to generate deposition paths for a simple-MAT region, and then discuss a variant approach for handling shapes other than this type of geometry. The following examines the approaches of directly generating deposition paths from simple MAT. Let M be a simple MAT in two-dimensional space. The boundary of the gure M represents can be constructed as follows: Let such a simple MAT be M : (x(s), y (s), r (s)), s [0, l]
, where (x(s), y (s)) is the skeleton trajectory parameterized by arc length s in R2 ; l is the total curve-length of the skeleton; r (s) is the radius function at arc length s and is greater than or equal to zero everywhere (r (s) 0).
114
end points
end points
normal points
qs
qe
ql qr
Figure 6.4: An example of a simple MAT where each normal point contacts the boundary at exactly two points. The rst gure shows the original geometry. The second gure shows its MAT and the types of MA points. The last one shows the construction of boundary curves from the MAT.
115
When x(s) and y (s) are C 1 -continuous, the boundary curves on its left q l and right q r can be expressed as (see Appendix and Figure 6.4)
l l q l (s) = (qx (s), qy (s)) r r q r (s) = (qx (s), qy (s))
,where
l qx (s) = x(s) r (s)[r (s )x (s) + (1 r (s ) 2 ) l (s) = y (s) r (s)[r (s )y (s) (1 r (s ) ) qy r (s ) qx r (s ) qy 1/2
y (s)] y (s)]
2 1/2
x (s)] x (s)]
= x(s) r (s)[r (s )x (s) (1 r (s ) ) = y (s) r (s)[r (s )y (s) + (1 r (s ) )
2 1/2
2 1/2
,given that 1 r (s ) 1 . (6.1)
q l and q r are connected at the ends by two circular arc caps (q s and q e ) with radius r (0) and r (l), respectively, and the joining points between boundary curves and arcs have C 1 -continuity since q l and q r are both tangent to q s and q e . The boundary curves Q(M ) of M , which is the concatenation of all four curves, are therefore tangently smooth: Q(M : x(s), y (s), r (s)) = q s q r q e q l . With this formula, deposition paths can be generated accordingly. This is accomplished by successively shrinking the geometry until it diminishes. The amount of shrinking is simply controlled by a new MA radius function r (s), which is always smaller than the original radius r (s). The following table shows two dierent strategies of generating spiral paths: one with constant oset, and the other with varying step-over distances to accommodate non-uniform thickness of the region. The constant-osetting approach produces the same results as produced by directly osetting the boundary curves. The latter
116
Formula
Constant-osetting approach r i (s) = max(r (s) i d, 0.);
Adaptive-osetting approach r i (s) = r (s) ( ni1/2 )r (s)
Example Table 6.1: Formulas and examples of the constant-osetting and adaptive-osetting approaches. approach, the adaptive-osetting method, is preferred when widths of deposits are adjustable throughout the path. For extrusion based deposition processes, moving the deposition head at dierent feed-rates allows dierent widths of deposits. The above formulas provide equations of computing the new radius function r i for the i-th oset curve. The examples show the results of applying these formulas until the entire oset curve diminishes. In Table 6.1, d is the step-over distance for the constant-osetting approach and n is the number of oset curves for the adaptiveosetting approach.
6.4
Shape Optimization for Optimal Deposition Paths
As discussed in previous sections, deposition path generation using direct recursiveosetting approaches would possibly produce piecewise paths with sharp turns, and consequently, voids or gaps may exist. In order to overcome this diculty, a geometrymanipulation strategy is adopted, and an optimization problem is formulated to determine such optimal deposition geometry. Once such optimal geometry is generated, the adaptive-osetting approach is applied to produce connected spiral deposition paths with varying step-over distances. An ideal geometry should exhibit the following properties. 1. It should result in the least amount of excess deposits.
117
B-rep model with original deposition path
very difficult
Optimized B-rep with optimized deposition path
Medial axis transform
MA radius optimization
Optimized medial axis transform
Figure 6.5: Shape optimization for optimal deposition paths. This diagram shows the proposed approach. First, it optimizes the given geometry based on its medial axis transform, and then generates deposition path directly from the optimized MAT. 2. It should produce smooth deposition paths with the least amount of sharp turns. 3. It should yield no disconnected paths. We observed that recursive-osetting algorithms based on boundary representations give no or little indication on the possibility of generating disconnected inner oset curves, unless the oset paths are explicitly computed. As a result, it is expensive and dicult to directly manipulate the cross-sectional geometry via its boundary representation. Since MAT oers the direct access to the intrinsic geometric properties, it facilitates the formulation and computation of solving a shape optimization problem. Therefore, a skeleton-based shape optimization is adopted to determine an optimal deposition geometry. Once the optimized MAT is determined, the corresponding boundary representation and the deposition paths can be directly computed (Figure 6.5). The following formulates such a shape optimization problem based on MAT. Let S be the medial axis (skeleton) of the original cross-sectional geometry, and r0 (s) be the radius function parameterized by the arc length s. Here, we limit our
118
discussion to simple MATs only. To simplify the problem, we do not attempt to optimize the skeleton: we x the skeleton and allow the radius function r (s) to be optimized to represent dierent geometry. There are several constraints that r (s) needs to satisfy. First, r (s) should be greater than r0 (s) to ensure a full enclosure of deposition over the desired geometry, i.e., r (s ) r 0 (s ) Next, r (s) should represent a valid MAT radius function, i.e. r (s ) 0 In addition, the normal MA points should maintain a two-point contact with the boundaries to facilitate the computation of deposition path: (Equation 6.1) 1 r (s ) 1 For the adaptive deposition strategy where oset distances can vary, we constrain the step-over distance to be in a process-dependent acceptable range [dmin , dmax ]: dmin r (s ) dmax h
where h is the predetermined number of passes required to fully ll the optimized region, and can be approximated as follows: h= r0 max 1 (d + dmax ) 2 min
where r0 max is the maximum of r0 (s). For eciency, the amount of excess deposition needs to be minimized. The amount of excess materials can be approximated by taking the integral of the radii dierences
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between r (s) and r0 (s) over the entire skeleton. |r (s) r0 (s)|ds
S
Since r (s) r0 (s) > 0 and
r0 (s)ds is a constant (r0 (s) is known), we can further
simplify the above formulation to F1 =

S
r (s)ds
To achieve fairness of curves, and in turn, to produce a smooth path without unnecessary turns, we maximize the stretch and minimize the waviness of r(s) by minimizing F2 =
S
|r (s)|ds
and F3 =
S
|r (s)|ds
Therefore, the problem becomes to
minimize
r (s)
w1 F1 + w2 F2 + w3 F3 1 r (s ) 1 , dmin r (s)/h dmax
subject to r (s) r0 (s),
,where w1 , w2 , and w3 are the weights for the three objective functions, and the medial axis radius function is the free variable to this problem. This is a function optimization problem and may be solved by calculus of variations. To simplify the problem, we approximate r (s) by a B-spline function with
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degree p and n + 1 control points

n
r (s ) =
j =0
Nj,p(s)Pj
,where Pj is the j -th control point, Nj,p is the j -th basis function with degree p. After appropriate discretization and reformulation that replaces the absolute value functions with square functions, we obtain the following optimization problem in a matrix form: minimize
P
f = P T AP Np T 1 0
Np T subject to Np T NT p Np T ,where
1 P + r0 hr 0max hr0max
A = w1 NN T + w2 N N and
+ w3 N N
N (s ) N (s ) N (s ) 1,p 1 1,p m 1,p 0 N = . . . . . . . . . Nn,p (s0 ) Nn,p (s1 ) Nn,p (sm ) N (i) =
(i) N0,p (s0 ) (i) N1,p (s0 ) (i) N0,p (s1 ) (i) N1,p (s1 )
N0,p (s0 ) N0,p (s1 )
N0,p (sm )
. . .
. . .
(i) N0,p (sm ) (i) N1,p (sm )
. . .
Nn,p (s0 ) Nn,p (s1 ) Nn,p (sm )
(i)
(i)
(i)
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s0 , s1 , . . . sm represent m discretized locations where si = il/m; N = N (1) and N = N (2) . The control points are the free variables for this problem. This is a quadratic optimization problem subject to linear constraints, and can be solved by many ecient algorithms. In summary, the procedures to generate the optimal spiral paths are as follow: 1. 2. 3. 4. Compute MAT of the original 2D cross-section. Re-parameterize the medial axis by its arc length. Solve the above optimization problem. Compute spiral paths from the medial axis and the optimized radius function.
6.5
Examples
As discussed in previous sections, deposition paths are generated based on the optimized cross-sectional geometry and the adaptive-osetting technique. This approach is especially suitable for parts with relatively thin or skinning features. The rst example (Figure 6.6) begins with a smooth boundary. Due to presence of bottleneck features, the paths generated by recursive-osetting approach result in discontinuities. Using the convex hull approach, continuous spiral paths are possible (not shown in this gure). However, it would require relatively large amount of excess deposition. By applying the proposed optimization technique, it produces smooth paths with smaller deposition area. In this example, a B-spline function with 10 control points and degree 3 is used to specify the optimal MAT radius function. In Figure 6.6, the original radius function is shown as dash lines, and the optimized function is indicated by a bold solid curve; the dotted lines show the intermediate radius functions during the optimization process. Due to the objective of smooth curves, the optimal curve does not exactly follow the middle bump. Instead, it stretches out of the boundaries. And because of the minimum step-over distance constraint, the optimal radius function does not reach the minimum of the original radii. The next example (Figure 6.7) is a section of an embedded copper deposit in
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original geometry and paths
optimize the MAT radii for optimal shape r(s)

6 4 2 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
optimized geometry and paths
Figure 6.6: Optimal deposition path planning for a shape with contraction features. Originally, oset paths are disconnected. After the deposition region is optimized, a smooth connected path with varying osetting distances is produced.
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original geometry and paths
optimize the MAT radii for optimal shape r(s)12

10 8 6 4 2 0 0 50 100 150
optimized geometry and paths
Figure 6.7: Optimal deposition path planning for a curved layer geometry. By optimizing the medial axis radii and applying the adaptive oset strategy, an optimal shape and resulting deposition paths are produced. For this particular geometry, the areas between optimized and original geometry do not dier much.
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an injection mold. The original geometry results in multiple disconnected paths. By slightly modifying the geometry via the proposed approach, a smooth connected deposition path is produced.
6.6
Discussion and Conclusions
In additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication, parts are iteratively built and shaped. Each build step requires a number of 2D layers of material to be deposited. As observed from previous sections, deposition paths generated by direct recursiveoset approaches often result in piecewise pass segments with sharp corners. As a result, portion of regions may not be completely lled with materials; voids or gaps are often present. In order to overcome this problem, a shape optimization methodology is employed; smooth spiral deposition paths with varying step-over distances are computed based on the optimized geometry. Shape optimization is necessary to streamline the shape, to accommodate deposition widths, and to remove undesired features such as sharp corners. Furthermore, paths with varying step-over distances allow the layer deposited in a seamless spiral pattern. The technique of using relaxed shape for depositing material is suitable in additive/subtractive SFF in that material removal processes are employed to remove excess materials as a result of shape relaxation. The widths of deposits can be controlled by varying feed-rates of deposition heads in extrusion-based deposition processes. Convex hull and ellipse hull approaches provide simple solutions to eliminate path discontinuity, however, small undeposited regions around sharp corners and gaps in internal area may still exist. Moreover, the eciency of applying these approaches is doubtful, especially for some cross-sectional geometries that are not near convex. Although reducing step-over distances between passes may reduce or eliminate gaps, we aim at strategies that could not only intrinsically optimize path topology and minimize sharp turns, but also minimize the area of an optimal shape. In this chapter, we limit our discussion to geometry with simple MATs, in other
125
words, elongated shapes. For layers with relatively low aspect ratios or with constrained geometry, we recommend to utilize Helds approach [26] to compute an optimal set of step-over distances that result in complete lling. However, this method, when applied to layer deposition, could result in excessive material deposits in the interior since the computed step-over distances may exceed the range of producible deposition widths (e.g., the ideal path width is smaller than the producible deposition width.) Therefore, it often requires an intermediate step to plane the top of deposited materials in order to control the build-up. Such operations increase overall build time. Another alternative for layer geometry with multi-branch medial axes is to decompose the layer into sub-regions, each with a single medial axis branch. Each sub-region is optimized according to the proposed methodology. Materials in the sub-regions are then individually deposited. This approach may result in excess deposition at the medial axis branch points. Therefore, it is only considered suitable for shapes consisting of multiple elongated branches.
Chapter 7 Automated Cutting Tool Selection

NC (Numerical Control) programming has greatly improved the productivity of machining processes. Semi-automated tool path programming has been implemented in most of the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems. This, however, is not sucient to deliver the promise for full machining planning and process automation without an automated cutter selection strategy. In this chapter, we propose an automated tool selection algorithm for bulk material removal, for machining near-net deposits, and for nish machining. The proposed methods assume the use of a 3-axis machine and at-end mills.
7.1
Introduction
In additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication (SFF), material of a compact is deposited and then shaped to the desired geometry. Due to the incremental build procedures in additive/subtractive SFF, many tedious operations can be eliminated. For example, special xturing is not required since sacricial materials and previously fabricated part components serve as custom xtures during the part build processes. Furthermore, when a 3-axis mill is used, there exist no tool interference problems since every machining surface has an upward-facing normal with respect to the build direction. These reduce the complexity in performing the automated planning for machining operations. 126
CHAPTER 7. AUTOMATED CUTTING TOOL SELECTION
127
In additive/subtractive SFF, material can be deposited to near-net shape of targeted layer geometry, or could be cast into a machined cavity. Machining operations for the former case only require to remove areas near the machining surfaces, whereas the latter case demands to remove a solid area of material. Among numerous process planning tasks for machining operations, tool path generation has been well developed in many commercial packages. Automated tool selection, however, still presents dicult challenges. In this chapter, we assume: A 3-axis mill and at-end cutters are employed to shape the decomposed components. The build direction is in line with the z direction of the 3-axis mill. A 3D surface is machined step by step along the z direction. With these assumptions machining operations can be considered to be on a sequence of 2D layers, whose geometries reect the negative volume of all previously built compacts. (A negative volume is the dierence between stock and part geometry in conventional machining processes. Here we refer the negative volume to be the volume that must be emptied after the shaping process.) We address the following problems in this chapter: Determine a set of cutting tools to eciently remove bulk materials for minimal machining time (section 7.3). Determine a set of cutting tools to eciently remove materials for near-net deposition (section 7.4). Determine a cutting tool for nish machining (section 7.5).
7.2
Related Work
Bulk material removal can be accomplished by a series of pocket machining operations at dierent depths. Several approaches have been proposed to automatically selecting
128
cutting tools for pocket machining. Lee et al. [36] proposes an approach based on subdivision. They represent machining regions by octrees and match proper tools for the octants. To achieve ecient rough cutting, the largest possible tool is selected. The remaining rough cutting tools depend on the sizes of remaining unmachined octants. Kyoung et al. [31] suggested a branch-and-bound search method to nd an optimal set of cutting tools. They represent all possible combinations of cutting tools in a tool combination tree. In this tree, a node is labeled with a cutter size, which is always smaller than that of its parent. The path from the root to a leaf node denotes one possible tool combination. By a breadth-rst search, a set of tools with minimum machining time is eciently identied. In their method, total machining time is evaluated by explicitly computing the tool paths associated with the selected cutters. Arya et al. [4] presented an approach for determining optimal arrangement of machining regions for the given set of cutters. Each region is to be machined by one of the given cutters, and the union of these machining regions represents the complete pocket area. They based their approach on quadtree decomposition and transformed the problem into a weighted set-cover problem. The goal is to minimize the total tool path length. In the quadtree- and octree-based methods, the machining region is approximated by the decomposed cells. Dimensions of the cells indicate accessibility of corresponding sizes of cutting tools. Due to the NPhard nature [2] of this problem, both Lee [36] and Arya [4] utilize a greedy method to locate the machining area with the largest tool. In other words, the largest possible cutting tool is always selected to remove the remaining unmachined area. Kyong et al. [31], on the other hand, compute an optimal set of cutting tools that achieve minimum machining time. The largest possible tool need not be always selected, for it would result in relatively large unmachined areas. Furthermore, it would require a large number of cutting tools for shapes with a wide range of feature sizes. In addition, in their approach the eciency of machining is evaluated by explicit computation of tool paths. Such computation is expensive, since construction of tool paths often requires osetting, intersecting, and trimming of curves.
129
In this chapter, we propose an optimization scheme based on the clearance function representation. The accessible region for a given cutting tool is recognized by the clearance function of the boundary. The tool path length is approximated by the tool size and the accessible area. Furthermore, a more succinct representation based on encoding of the clearance function is proposed to further alleviate the evaluation of machining time.
7.3
Tool Selection for Bulk Material Removal
The goal for ecient machining is to nd appropriate machining parameters so that total production time can be minimized while the machined parts meet the design specications such as geometric accuracy and tolerances. Total production time consists of machining time and other auxiliary time spent on setting up xtures or cutting tools. In additive/subtractive SFF, no specic setup or xturing is necessary. Therefore, machining time and tool change time are dominating factors that aect total production eciency. Machining time can be formulated as a function of tool path length and feed-rates. Length of tool paths is in turn a function of geometry of machining volume and the cutting tool. However, machining geometry imposes limitations on the tool size due to allowable clearance or tool accessibility. To complete machining, one would need a smaller cutter that could t into every portion of machining volume. It is unwise though to solely use such a cutter to machine the entire area. Therefore, a set of multiple cutters are often necessary. To determine an optimal set of cutters for minimum machining time is generally a dicult problem. This is because computing machining time or tool path length involves geometric evaluation that usually has no analytic forms. Common methods to solving this problem rely on generate-and-test approaches: a cutting tool is randomly chosen and corresponding tool paths are computed, then the required machining time is evaluated based on path length and feed-rates. Such generate-and-test approaches are computationally expensive, especially when multiple tools need to be considered. Here we propose an approximation approach based on medial axis transform and
130
clearance functions. This approach is based on the following observation: A at-end cutter with radius r can access a boundary point that has a clearance value greater than or equal to r . The smallest at-end cutter used for pocket machining has to be smaller than or equal to the minimum clearance value of the machining area in order for complete material removal. The largest at-end cutter used for pocket machining has to be smaller than or equal to the maximum clearance value of the machining area for tool accessibility. The length of the tool path for machining all accessible regions by a given atend cutter with radius r can be approximated by the area of the accessible regions divided by r . Based on the above observations, we could dene a function A : R R that maps an arbitrary cutter radius r to its accessible area, where r is a value between zero and the largest clearance value within the machining region. The tool path length associated with the cutter r can be approximated by A(r )/r . Therefore, our task becomes to minimize A(r )/r for minimum machining time. We shall formulate this problem as follows.
7.3.1
Continuous Analytical Model

s2 s1
Let C (s) be the clearance function associated with the contour curve parameterized by s. The integral s2 . Denition 7.1 (Generalized Trapezoid) A generalized trapezoid Ts1 ,s2 is a region bounded by boundaries from s1 to s2 and their associated medial axes: (Figure 7.1) Ts1 ,s2 = {p(s) | p(s) = (s) + t n(s), 0 t C (s), s1 s s2 } C (s)ds measures the area of the trapezoid bounded by s1 and
131
111111 000000 000000 111111 000000 111111 T3 4 000000 111111 000000 3 111111 000000 111111 000000 111111 000000 111111 000000 111111 000000 111111 0000000000 1111111111 000000 0000000000111111 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 T1 2 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 2

11111 00000 00000 11111 00000 11111 00000 11111 2 1 11111 00000 00000 11111 00000 11111 00000 11111 00000 111111 2
1111 0000 0000 1111 0000 1111 3 0000 1111 0000 1111 0000 1111 0000 1111 0000 1111
Figure 7.1: Generalized trapezoids for a 2D object. The hatched regions in the clearance function corresponds to the generalized trapezoids shown in the top gure. The integral
s2 s1
C (s)ds equals to the area of the trapezoid Ts1 ,s2 when the curva-
ture of the contour curve in [s1 , s2 ] is zero. The is true for linear segments. In general, we shall introduce a weighting function (s) that scales the integral to reect the true value of the trapezoid area.
area(Ts1 ,s2 ) =
s2
(s)C (s)ds
s1
The trapezoids that are accessible by the cutter r correspond to contour segments with clearance values greater than or equal to r .
132
s 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000 111111111111111111 000000000000000000
C (s )
11 00 00 11 00 11 00 r 11 00 11 00 11 00 11
00000 111111 11111 000000 00000 11111 000000 111111 00000 11111 000000 111111 00000 11111 000000 111111 00000 11111 000000 111111 00000 000000 11111 111111 00000 11111 000000 111111 00000 11111 000000 111111 00000 000000 11111 111111
111 000 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111
11111 00000 00000 11111 00000 11111 00000 11111 00000 11111 00000 11111 00000 11111 00000 11111 00000 s 11111
Figure 7.2: r -accessible trapezoids. Denition 7.2 (r -Accessible Trapezoid) A r -accessible trapezoid is the union of a set of generalized trapezoids associated with boundaries Sr that have clearance values greater than or equal to r : (Figure 7.2) Sr = { s | C ( s ) r } Tr = {p(s) | p(s) = (s) + t n(s), 0 t C (s), s Sr }
The length of tool paths for machining the accessible trapezoid Tr can be approximated by
133
Figure 7.3: R-accessible trapezoid and its relation with tool paths. The dashed lines in the top gure show the tool paths for cutters rLarge and rSmall .
Lr =
area(Tr ) = r
Sr
(s)C (s)ds r
When two cutters are considered, the smaller cutter rsmall need not re-machine the area completed by the larger cutter rlarge . Therefore, the eective machining area for the smaller cutter rsmall is the dierence of accessible trapezoids for rsmall and rlarge (Figure 7.3).
134
Lrlarge = = Lrsmall = = =
area(Trlarge )
Sr large
rlarge (s)C (s)ds
rlarge area(Trsmall )area(Trlarge )

Sr small
rsmall (s)C (s)ds

\S r
Sr
large
(s)C (s)ds
Sr
small
large
rsmall (s)C (s)ds
rsmall
More generally, let {r1 , r2 , . . . , rn } be a set of multiple tools considered, where r1 < r2 < < rn . The total machining path length by using these cutters in a decreasing order (from large to small cutters) can be formulated as
L=
i
Sri \Sri+1
(s)C (s)ds ri
To minimize the total machining time, we solve the following problem:
n,r1 ,r2 ,...,rn
minimize
Sri \Sri+1
(s)C (s)ds
r i F ri
+ nTchange
subject to r1 < r2 < < rn Sr i = { s | C ( s ) r i } Srn+1 = , where Tchange is the tool change time and Fri is the feed-rate associated with the cutter ri .
7.3.2
Discrete Histogram Model
To alleviate computation of trapezoid areas, we shall pre-compute the function

Sr
(s)C (s)ds to avoid repetitive evaluation. Since most of the cutting tools have
radii equal to multiples of 1/32 inch. We shall subdivide the parameter space of A according to their clearance values. This leads to the denition of clearance
135
histogram. Denition 7.3 (Clearance Histogram) A clearance histogram of a compact, connected, and regular domain A is a gure that represents a frequency distribution of clearances in the clearance function. This frequency distribution corresponds to the number of occurrence of a value in the clearance function.
The clearance histogram is an eective way to evaluate skinniness and fatness of a region, or can be used to identify the uniformness. Therefore, it is useful in estimating eectiveness of sweeping a region with a given disk. However, to evaluate the total path length, we need an eective clearance histogram to encode the trapezoidal areas associated with clearance values. Denition 7.4 (Eective Clearance Histogram) An eective clearance histogram of A is a gure that represents the total area of the generalized trapezoids associated with the given range of clearance values.
Let Ri , Ri+1 be a class interval in the eective clearance histogram, the corre+1 sponding rectangle area ARi in the histogram is equal to i
+1 ARi = i
(s)C (s)ds, where S = {s|Ri C (s) Ri+1 }

S
To evaluate the area that are sweepable by a given cutter with radius r , we can construct the accumulated clearance histogram. Denition 7.5 (Accumulated Clearance Histogram) An accumulated clearance histogram of A is a gure that records the total area of the generalized trapezoids associated with boundaries whose clearance values are equal to or larger than a given value.
136
00 11 11 00 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11
0 1 2 3
1111111111111111111111111 0000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000 1111111111111111111111111 0000000000000000000000000 1111111111111111111111111 3 0000000000000000000000000 1111111111111111111111111 0000000000000000000000000 1111111111111111111111111 2 0000000000000000000000000 1111111111111111111111111 0000000000000000000000000 1111111111111111111111111 1 0000000000000000000000000 1111111111111111111111111 0000000000000000000000000 1111111111111111111111111 0 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 000 111 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 000 111 000 111 00 11 000 111 000 111 000 111 00 11 000 111 000 111 000 111 00 11 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 000 111 111 000 000 111 111 000
000 111 11 00 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 011 1 000 111 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 1 0 111 000 1 0 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 11 0 0 111 000 11 00 11 00 00 0011 00 11 00 11 11 000 111
11 00 00 11 00 11 1 0 00 11 00 11
11 00 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11 00 11 000 111 00 11
0 1 2
Figure 7.4: Eective clearance histogram and the accumulated clearance histogram. These gures illustrate the generation of these two histograms.
137
The rectangle area of the accumulated clearance histogram for a class interval [Ri , Ri+1 ] represents the area A Ri accessible by a disk with radius Ri and can be computed directly from the eective clearance histogram
A Ri =
(s)C (s)ds =
S j i
+1 ARj , where S = {s|C (s) Ri } j
The accumulated clearance histogram records the areas of accessible regions for a set of cutting radii Ri . The optimization problem thus can be simplied as
(A ri Ari+1 )
n,r1 ,r2 ,...,rn
minimize
r i F ri
+ nTchange
subject to r1 < r2 < < rn , ri {R1 , R2 , , Rm }, nm , where R1 , R2, , Rm are a list of cutter candidates; the nal cutter selection r1 , r2 , , rn (n < m) is to be chosen from this list.
7.4
Tool Selection for Machining Near Net Deposits
In additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication, material is ideally deposited to the near-net shape. This not only consumes materials more eciently but also reduces time for subsequent material removal processes. To model this near net geometry, we assume that no materials are deposited more than distance away from boundaries of the targeted shapes. Our task is to compute a set of cutting tools to remove these excess deposits. The sizes of cutting tools are constrained by the minimal feature of the machining volume. However, when this minimal feature is much smaller than , it would be inecient to use a relatively small cutter to machine the entire area. Therefore a
138
combination of cutting tools need to be considered. On the other hand, since the geometry of near-net deposits could be considered to be with thickness of skin materials, it may be sucient to use a sequence of cutting tools with sizes in a decreasing order and traverse the machining boundaries with each cutter. However, this is not always satisfactory either, depending on the set of tools available and the machining geometry involved. In this section, we shall determine a set of machining tools for ecient machining on the near net deposits. In addition, machining areas for individual cutters are identied. To model the volume of excess deposits, we rst construct the delta volume of the targeted deposition region. The delta volume reects the region that should be emptied upon completion of machining operations. Since additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication does not begin with a pre-dened stock as in other conventional machining process, we create a suciently large box as a virtual stock that encloses the entire part geometry. This virtual box needs to be large enough so that restrictions or constraints put on geometry of the delta volume do not eect the outcome of cutting tool choices. In other words, the virtual box should be at least a diameter (of the largest tool considered) away from any point on the boundaries. Once the delta volume is extracted, we compute the clearance functions of all boundaries of a part. Since the virtual bounding box is suciently large, the clearance values of the boundaries reect true spacing with the part itself, not with the bounding box. Based on assumptions mentioned earlier, all materials are within distance away from the boundaries. We could model this excess area Ax as the following: Ax = {p(s) | p(s) = (s) + t n(s), 0 < t min(C (s), )} Note that we put the constraint for the maximum distance from the boundary. We could update the models proposed in the section 7.3 as follows:
139
n,r1 ,r2 ,...,rn
minimize
Sri \Sri+1
(s) min(C (s), )ds r i F ri
+ nTchange
subject to r1 < r2 < < rn Sr i = { s | C ( s ) r i } Srn+1 = Similarly, we could construct the accumulated clearance histogram for fast computation of the above optimization problem:
n,r1 ,r2 ,...,rn
minimize
(A ri Ari+1 )
ri
+ nTchange
subject to r1 < r2 < < rn , ri {R1 , R2 , , Rm }, nm A rn+1 = 0
7.5
Tool Selection for Finish Machining
There are two situations that constraint the size of the cutter to be smaller. One is the local geometric property of a contour curve: if any point on the contour has large curvature and its center of curvature is in the interior of the region, the cutter has to match the radius of curvature in order to follow the contour periphery. The other is due to its global property: when two portions of a contour are very close to each other, they form a narrow passage where a smaller cutter must be used to pass through the region. Both cases are captured by the medial axis transform since by denition a region can be entirely covered by union of disks with the radius equal to the smallest clearance that reside in its interior. A cutter with size equal to this minimum clearance is guaranteed to be able to completely remove material in the region. Therefore, the radius of the smallest cutter can be determined by nding the minimum value of the clearance function.
140
minimize
r
r r min C (s)
s
subject to r {R1 , R2 , , Rm },
7.6
Examples
Two examples are shown in this section. Figure 7.5 shows a pocket area and the encoded clearance histograms. The peaks in the eective clearance histogram indicate the thickness of the region with the most frequent occurrence. Such information is compiled into the accumulated clearance histogram to facilitate computation of accessible area for a given cutting tool. Figure 7.6 presents the result of tool selection for the pocket area shown in Figure 7.5. When the problem is constrained to selecting only one cutter, the entire machining process has to accommodate the smallest feature size. When multiple tools are considered, a larger cutter remove a good portion of the area, whereas a smaller tool cleans up the remaining unmachined regions. Note that the largest tool is not necessarily selected, since the larger the tool, the larger the unmachined area remained. As a result, more machining time is spent on cleaning up the unmachined area with the smaller cutter. Figure 7.7 shows an example of machining near-net deposited region. The width of the excess material surrounding the boundary of the targeted area is known. Cutters are selected according to eciency of machining.
7.7
Discussion and Conclusions
Tool selection is the backbone of automated machining planning. Conventionally, this is accomplished with experienced human intervention. Such human decision often provides no guarantee on complete machining or the best utilization of machining resources. Recently, machining simulation tools have been introduced to verify the
141
Figure 7.5: Eective and accumulated clearance histograms for the sample geometry shown on the top.
142
a. One cutter considered
b. Two cutters considered
cutter radii:
c. Three cutters considered
Figure 7.6: The results of tool selection for bulk material removal of the sample geometry.
143
a. Desired deposition region
b. Deposited area
c. Machining with 1 cutter
d. Machining with 2 cutters
cutter radius:
Figure 7.7: Tool selection for machining near-net deposits.
144
result of cutter selection and the associated tool path. Unmachined regions are graphically located, which suggests the need for using a smaller tool or choosing dierent machining parameters. The total machining time is also estimated based on tool path and feed-rates. However, these tools neither provide information on how small a nish cutter should be, nor suggest the set of cutting tools for ecient rough machining. This chapter focused on automated tool selection in 2 1/2 D domain. Threeaxis machines and at-end mills are considered. The nish tool is selected according to the smallest clearance value on the machining boundary. The optimal sets of cutters for removing bulk materials and excess near-net deposits are computed via an optimization formulation based on the medial axis transform and clearance functions. Furthermore, the clearance functions are encoded to discrete clearance histograms to alleviate explicit computation of tool paths. The proposed 2 1/2 D tool selection algorithm best benets the additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication due to directionality of the processes. In addition, the introduction of automated tool selection facilitates the process planning and improves the overall fabrication eciency. Although this approach is developed for additive/subtractive SFF, the same algorithm can be applied to conventional pocket machining and rough machining operations.
Chapter 8 Conclusions
Additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication (SFF) integrates material addition and removal) to build up three-dimensional objects incrementally. It is capable of producing engineering parts dicult, if not impossible, to build with traditional manufacturing processes. However, planning for such processes exhibits rigorous challenges due to process exibility and highly demanding planning automation. These challenges, moreover, can not be suciently tackled via common boundary representation of geometric models. In this thesis, techniques based on alternative geometric representations, Medial Axis Transform (MAT) and clearance functions, are presented to facilitate planning of additive/subtractive SFF. In particular, a shape optimization scheme is introduced to compute optimal layer geometry for producing high-quality deposition paths. Automated manufacturability analysis tools are presented to assist evaluation of part building and decomposition. Ecient cutting tool selection strategies are outlined for shaping near-net deposition as well as for bulk material removal. To reach this end, a new model is presented for computing the medial axis transforms of arbitrarily shaped compact regions in two dimensions. The techniques proposed in this thesis are mainly targeted at process planning for additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication. However, they are also applicable to planning of many other conventional manufacturing processes such as CNC machining. The next two sections discuss the contributions of this thesis work and future 145
CHAPTER 8. CONCLUSIONS
146
research directions that could benet from the ideas proposed in the thesis.
8.1
Contributions
The main research contributions of this thesis are summarized as follows. 1. A new representation for Medial Axis Transform Conventionally medial axis transform (MAT) is represented by geometry of medial axes and the distance from the medial axes to the nearest boundary entities [46, 45, 14, 60, 61, 59, 25]. This representation is useful for applications requiring explicit description of the medial axes such as in motion planning and pattern recognition. However, in many other engineering applications such as design shape analysis and manufacturing process planning, geometry of the medial axes is not of particular interest; proximity information associated with object boundaries is more important. Conventional MAT representation limits the performance of such computation since proximity metrics are not directly available in conventional MAT representation. This thesis proposes a new MAT representation using clearance functions. The clearance functions record the distance metrics on the boundary of objects. Since objects are usually described using boundary representation (B-rep), clearance functions utilize the existing B-rep of objects and record proximity information on the boundary. Such clearance function representation in conjunction with B-rep carries the same amount of proximity information as MAT, yet is very concise as only scalar values are to be added to the B-rep. 2. A generalized approach for computing 2D MAT Most of the existing algorithms for computing 2D MAT require objects represented by polygons or bounded by discrete points. Only a few approaches exist that are capable of handling curved objects, with or without holes. However, the approaches dealing with curved objects are usually not as ecient as those based on polygon or point approximation of objects.
147
In this thesis, a generalized approach based on [35] [62] and [14] is developed for constructing MAT of arbitrarily curved 2D objects. The proposed approach utilizes the divide-and-conquer methodology to compute clearance functions along the contours of input objects. The medial axis transform can be easily extracted from the computed clearance functions. With the proposed algorithm, tedious graph manipulation during MAT computation is avoided, associativity from a boundary to its clearance metric is readily available, and computation of clearance functions is more ecient than that of MAT since a clearance function maps a 2D boundary point to a scalar clearance metric, not a medial axis point in the 2D Euclidean space. 3. A feature-free methodology for tool accessibility analysis Tool accessibility analysis can be performed via pairwise distance computation between boundary elements [21], or by extracting machining features and matching them with available cutting tools [1, 30]. The former approach exhibits quadratic computational complexity, whereas the latter relies on feature recognition techniques. Both methods are not ecient for fast accessibility analysis. A feature-free methodology for tool accessibility analysis is proposed in this thesis. Since machining is performed only on non-undercut surfaces for additive/subtractive SFF, it suces to evaluate 3D cutting tool accessibility by successive 2D analysis. Inaccessible regions for a given cutter can be quickly identied via the clearance function representation. Moreover, surfaces corresponding to the inaccessible regions are immediately recognized following this analysis. Such tool accessibility analysis is applied to all possible build plans for a given part model to identify feasible build sequences in additive/subtractive SFF. 4. An innovative approach for optimal path generation Material deposition in solid freeform fabrication is usually performed in a 2D
148
manner. Generating 2D spiral deposition paths is often accomplished by recursively osetting the layer boundary. This approach, however, often results in piecewise pass segments with sharp corners, or gaps/voids in the interior of a 2D layer. In this thesis, a shape optimization algorithm based on medial axis transform is proposed to generate smooth, connected, and complete paths. A 2D layer geometry is relaxed to allow smooth paths to be constructed. The excess material deposits can then be removed via subtractive operations such as machining. In the proposed method, distance metrics stored on the medial axis are optimized to represent a smooth region. Deposition paths are then generated directly via the optimized medial axis transform. The computed paths are smooth, and result in no gaps in the interior of a 2D layer. This approach is best applied to relatively slender layer geometry. 5. An ecient cutting tool selection strategy Cutting tools are often determined with experienced user intervention. Although several attempts have been made to automatically identify cutter sizes for a given 2D machining geometry, they often rely on the more expensive generate-and-test methodology. Such a method randomly selects a cutter and evaluates the resulting machining time by explicitly computing the associated tool paths. This thesis provides an ecient selection strategy based on the proposed clearance function representation to achieve the minimal machining time. The machining region is rst encoded into a clearance histogram. Via this histogram, the length of tool paths and the associated machining time can be quickly approximated. Selecting a set of cutting tools for minimum machining time is then accomplished by an optimization, where the function evaluation can be directly assessed from the clearance histograms.
149
8.2
Future Work
The proposed medial axis transform and clearance function representation can be utilized in many other process planning tasks. Some of the potential applications and research directions are described below: 1. Computing clearance functions for 3D objects Most of the existing 3D MAT algorithms are based on Voronoi diagrams or Delaunay triangulation of the discrete boundary points [9, 63, 37, 55, 10]. Once the Voronoi diagram or Delaunay triangulation is computed, the entities in the interior of the original objects are extracted and pruned to represent the approximated medial axis geometry or skeletons. However, the pruning processes to remove spurious structures introduced by boundary discretization are normally cumbersome and may alter the homotopy of the skeletons [9, 10]. In the applications where proximity information is of more importance than the geometry of medial axes or skeletons, the proposed clearance function representation is more ecient and useful. Computing clearance functions based on the proposed representation does not require pruning of the Voronoi diagrams; the clearance metrics can be directly retrieved from the diagrams and the adjacency information of the boundary points. Furthermore, since the proposed representation is based on the B-rep of objects, it can be easily distinguished whether a particular Voronoi edge is introduced by the discretization errors or by the original geometric characteristics. The clearance function representation oers the same amount of information as provided by MAT in terms of proximity information, and yet the computation based on the proposed representation is less complex. 2. Evaluating clearance for material deposition An important characteristic of additive/subtractive solid freeform fabrication is the alternate deposition and machining processes. Materials could be deposited onto an existing component and shaped to the desired geometry. Alternatively, they could be formed by casting materials into a pre-shaped cavity. For the
150
latter type of deposition, geometry of the cavity often limits materials to be completely deposited. For example, if a cavity is relatively tall and thin, materials usually have diculty to reach corners of the cavity, leaving voids or gaps at the corners. For viscous materials, narrow cavities prevent them from reaching the bottom. Such problems degrade the material integrity and are very dicult to discover during layer build processes. The clearance function representation can be utilized to detect such problems during the part decomposition stage. Similar to the strategies used in tool accessibility analysis (Chapter 5), surfaces that bound the deposition regions and cause incomplete deposition can be identied. This leaves options to select dierent build sequences, or to apply other build techniques such as the overcutll-trim-backll strategy [15]. 3. Generating electrode geometry for die-sinking electrical discharge machining (EDM) Many engineering parts can not be fabricated by CNC machining alone due to the presence of small features compared with available cutter sizes. For metal parts, electrical discharge machining (EDM) is an alternative to machining relatively narrow and sharp regions. In particular, die-sinking EDM can be utilized to machine internal cavities and sharp corners. This process requires EDM electrodes to be fabricated prior to the EDM operation. The geometry of EDM electrodes is often determined by experienced persons. To generate the electrode geometry for die-sinking EDM, the regions left by machining processes have to be known. Such regions correspond to the inaccessible areas (Chapter 5) of the smallest cutter used in CNC machining. The surfaces requiring EDM operations are then those bounding the inaccessible regions. By grouping and synthesizing the adjacent surfaces requiring EDM, geometry of the electrodes can be extracted with the help of extrusion operations.
Appendix A Conversion from MAT to Boundary Representation

The left and right boundary curves of a simple MAT can be computed as follows: (Fig.A.1)
l qx (s) = x(s) + r (s) cos( + /2 + )
= x(s) r (s) sin( + ) = x(s) r (s) [sin() cos() + cos() sin()] = x(s) r (s) [r (s )x (s) + (1 r (s ) 2 ) Similarly,
1/2
y (s)]
151
APPENDIX A. CONVERSION FROM MAT TO BOUNDARY REPRESENTATION152
l (qxl (s+ds), qy (s+ds))
y
l (qlx(s), qy (s))
r+dr
r (x(s), y(s))
(x(s+ds), y(s+ds)) ds
r (qxr(s+ds), qy (s+ds)) r (qx (s), qy (s)) r
Figure A.1: Boundary curve approximation between two adjacent MAT disks at s and s + ds.
l qy (s) = y (s) + r (s) sin( + /2 + )
= y (s) r (s) [r (s )y (s) (1 r (s ) 2 )

r qx (s) = x(s) + r (s) cos( /2 )
1/2
x (s)]
= x(s) r (s) [r (s )x (s) (1 r (s ) 2 )

r qy (s) = y (s) + r (s) sin( /2 )
1/2
y (s)]
= y (s) r (s) [r (s )y (s) + (1 r (s ) 2 )
1/2
x (s)]
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Process Planning For Additive/Subtractive Solid Freeform Fabrication Using Medial Axis Transform

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PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SOLID FREEFORM FABRICATION USING MEDIAL AXIS TRANSFORM

By Ju-Hsien Kao June 1999

c Copyright 1999 by Ju-Hsien Kao All Rights Reserved

Fritz B. Prinz (Principal Adviser)

Approved for the University Committee on Graduate Studies:

Thesis Scope and Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thesis Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Extension to Generalized Curvilinear Polygons . . . . . . . . . . . . . Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 107

7 Automated Cutting Tool Selection 7.1 7.2 7.3

7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7

8 Conclusions 8.1 8.2

Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 151 153

A Conversion from MAT to Boundary Representation Bibliography

Part decomposition and a build sequence for an injection molding insert. 19

4.10 Tracing the clearance function.

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7

Solid Freeform Fabrication

Iterative layer deposition

Finished part (after support structures removed)

Additive/Subtractive Solid Freeform Fabrication

additive procedure (deposition)

subtractive procedure (shaping)

finished part (after support structures removed)

Process Planning and Geometric Reasoning

Medial Axis Transform

Thesis Scope and Problem Statement

MAT Computation of Arbitrarily Shaped 2D Objects:

Manufacturability Analysis for Part Decomposition:

Path Planning for Material Deposition:

Automated Cutting Tool Selection:

Chapter 2 Process Planning for Additive/Subtractive SFF

Process Planning Tasks and Requirement

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 13

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 14

(e.g., to resolve geometric constraints and process constraints)

for each decomposed model

Figure 2.1: Process planning steps in additive/subtractive SFF.

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 15

Determining Build Direction

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 16

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 17

Planning for Material Addition

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 18

111111111 000000000 000000000 111111111

0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111

support material 11 : 00 00 : subtrate 11

1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000 1111111111 0000000000

2. 2a. 1. (a) : part material : support material

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 19

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 20

Planning for Material Removal

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 21

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 22

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 23

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 24

Determine Build Orientation

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 25

Planning for Material Addition

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 26

Planning for Material Removal

CHAPTER 2. PROCESS PLANNING FOR ADDITIVE/SUBTRACTIVE SFF 27

Parameter-line patterns can be easily created by following the constant-parameter curves.