An Efficient Procedure for Reverse Engineering Parts and Assemblies in Vehicle Packaging to Improve Surface Reconstruction Accuracy

Abstract

The Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association of Canada launched the first, original, full-build zero-emission concept vehicle named Project Arrow. As an all-Canadian effort, Arrow has been designed, engineered and built by Canadian researchers and manufacturers. This project brought together the best of the best of Canada’s vehicle design, electric-drive, alternative-fuel, connected and autonomous and light-weight technology engineers and Canadian companies to work with university researchers. Ontario Tech partnered in Project Arrow as the lead academic institution to complete the engineering design and the fabrication phase of this national project. Packaging is traditionally the most complex task in vehicle structural design, responsible to accommodate for all the parts and components integrated in the vehicle in minimum space and optimum level of mass distribution, while the interactions between the parts and assemblies are accurately maintained. As the main requirement for this important task, all the parts and components need to be accurately modeled. Due to the large variety of the parts and assembly items collected from the various suppliers, accurate 3D modeling for many of these items were missing. The Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) in automotive industries typically collect the required information and 3D models over the years and decades through their organic development. However, this was not the case in project arrow design and fabrication. Therefore, a comprehensive reverse engineering project was conducted at Advanced Digital Design, Manufacturing, and Metrology (AD2M Labs), Ontario Tech university to complete this task. Digital metrology using various optical and tactile sensors were conducted by the team to digitize over 50 parts and assemblies. The objective has been to interactively revise the overall packaging of the vehicle for an optimum functionality and fit of the designed components.

Working within a very tight timeframe, the team innovatively developed a consistent and efficient procedure to reconstruct surfaces and model the parts and assemblies in high level of accuracy and at the minimum cost. The team structured and implemented a systematic reverse engineering process to complete this task, which allows deconstructing individual components of complex assemblies, piece by piece, to collect and revise the engineering knowledge in their original design and re-model them for the purpose of Arrow project. The developed innovative process named as 5Cs includes five stages of Combining, Cleaning, Converging, Coordinate Alignment, and Condensing. This paper principles of the developed procedure and presents the employed methodologies behind this development. The procedure successfully implemented in reverse engineering of all the digitalized parts and assemblies used in project arrow and the highly satisfactory results have been achieved. Following the successful completion of the project, the 5Cs procedure have been used to model in several other reverse engineering projects with satisfactory results. This procedure can be well adopted by many other industrial sectors when there is a need to reconstruct surface and solid models from actual parts and assemblies.