Automated feature extraction for hybrid additive-subtractive remanufacturing

Hybrid manufacturing combines additive manufacturing's advantages in building complex geometries and subtractive manufacturing's benefits in dimensional precision and surface quality. This technology shows great potential to support remanufacturing. However, the feature extraction process relies heavily on manual operations to determine where and when material should be added or removed. To address the challenging issue, an automated feature extraction method is developed. In the proposed method, the level-set function based solid representation approach is introduced. Then, initial features are extracted by registration and modification by respecting different additive manufacturing constraints. Final features are determined by feature recognition algorithms.