Presidential Young Investigator Award: Feature-based Manufacturing

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The research of this Presidential Young Investigator has two goals. The first goal is to create software techniques to estimate automatically manufacturing costs based on a part description stored in a computer-aided design (CAD) system as a solid model. Manufacturing costs are a function of the machining process, and, in turn, the machining process is a function of the features of a part. The proposed cost estimator consists of two modules: a feature recognizer and a feature interpreter. The recognizer acts on a solid model boundary representation to extract form features. The interpreter uses the features in selecting manufacturing processes and determining processing costs. In addition to the clear benefit of being able to estimate costs during the design process, the estimator will help determine a useful set of form features for manufacturing in general. The second goal is to develop a feature language that can be used to describe features in terms of geometric and topological primitives such as faces, edges, vertices, and vertex-edge loops. The use of feature in CAD is in its infancy, primarily because no complete taxonomy has been developed. The taxonomy depends on the capability to sort features based upon certain characteristics. A feature language with a well-formed grammar would allow unambiguous definitions to be written for various classes of features. Candidate language constructs include syntactic pattern grammars and graph grammars. The results of this research will yield a compendium of features together with an organized and mathematical way to define and store them. This advances will aid those involved in both feature recognition and feature-based design.