Reverse Engineering in Product Manufacturing

Reverse engineering plays vital role in the branch of the mechanical design and manufacturing based industry. This technique has been widely recognized as an important technique in the product design cycle. In regular computerized manufacturing environment, the operation order usually starts from the product design and ends with machine operation to convert raw material into final product. It is often essential to reproduce a CAD model of existing part using any digitization techniques, when original drawings or documentation are not available and used for analysis and modifications are required to construct a improved product design. In reverse engineering approach the important steps involved, are characterizations of geometric models and related surface representations, segmentation and surface fitting of simple and free-form shapes, and creating accurate CAD models. The chapter presents review on reverse engineering methodology and its application areas related to product design development. The product re-design and research with reverse engineering will largely reduced the production period and costs in product manufacturing industries.