Rigid and Non-rigid Shape Matching for Mechanical Components Retrieval

Reducing the setup time for a new production line is critical to the success of a manufacturer within the current competitive and cost-conscious market. To this end, being able to reuse already available machines, toolings and parts is paramount. However, matching a large warehouse of previously engineered parts to a new component to produce, is often more a matter of art and personal expertise rather than predictable science. In order to ease this process we developed a database retrieval approach for mechanical components that is able to deal with both rigid matching and deformable shapes. The intended use for the system is to match parts acquired with a 3D scanning system to a large database of components and to supply a list of results sorted according with a metric that expresses a structural distance.