MERGE: An Immersive Environment for Reverse Engineering of Legacy Mechanical Parts

by
Suraj Musuvathy

Advised by
Elaine Cohen

Reverse engineering legacy mechanical parts presents a unique and formidable challenge as the process is influenced by various factors such as availability of multiple (possibly incomplete, inconsistent or obsolete) sources of information, heterogeneous nature of resources, hard time constraints, need for significant domain knowledge expertise and need for modern CAD models that can drive state-of-the-art CAM processes.

We present a new approach toward reverse engineering of legacy mechanical parts that is motivated by the need for an elegant solution to these challenges. The proposed "Multiple Engineering Resources aGent Environment" (MERGE) system presents a unified environment for simultaneously processing information from multiple sources to create a CAD model that more accurately reflects the design intent of a physical part. By enabling coherent visualization, intuitive interaction, and augmenting various computational agents in an immersive environment, the MERGE system aims at making the reverse engineering process more effective.