Ongoing research on adaptive layered manufacturing from overtraced freehand sketch

Abstract

Freehand sketch on a paper is commonly seen being used as it is an effective convenient way to express rough ideas. The sketch is typically transformed to be a 3D CAD model by a designer for subsequent operations such as rapid prototyping process where a physical prototype is fabricated from a 3D CAD model. To speed up the realization of an idea, a research called adaptive layered manufacturing from overtraced freehand sketch has been being developed as an attempt to shorten steps from having a sketch drawing to obtaining a physical prototype. Presented in this paper is the current progress of the research. A single line drawing identification module is being developed to transform a paper-based overtraced freehand sketch to be a single line drawing. This module is required to generate more information about the sketch (i.e., the number of lines and their starting points and endpoints) since the initial information is limited to a batch of points. The algorithms developed for this module have been implemented on LabVIEW program. Some examples of sketch to a single line drawing transformation are also presented in this paper. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited.