Nasa Report

Introduction

This summer has been a great experience. I have had the honor of working in the Advanced Manufacturing building in the Rapid Prototyping Lab with Ken Cooper. There, I studied two sets of software and worked with a 3-D digitizer scanner. The lab itself was interesting. There were several machines and several gadgets lying around. Each machine had a specific purpose. I didn't nearly have enough time to accomplish everything that I was trying to achieve.

My assignment was to get a handle on how the software worked and figure out the kinks so that I could then report it back to my department. My mentor Ken was very open with me on things that would make learning the software a little easier. The software was a little difficult to master considering the amount of time I had to spend with the software. I did several tests to understand the concept of the actually process of scanning an object to transform into and actual 3 D figure. The all-purpose of the rapid prototyping scanning was to help out the issues of space travel and making parts for the shuttle or needed parts that could be made virtually out of powders, like sugar and cornstarch!

Geomagic Studio 5 Software

The software that I have had the opportunity to work on was Geomagic Studio 5 and Minolta polygon Editing Tool. Studio 5 came with a training CD that went over some basic how to on the software. The Geomagic Studio is to automatically generate an accurate digital model from any physical part. Geomagic is also ideal for emerging applications such as mass productions of customized devices, build- to- order manufacturing, and automatic recreation of legacy parts. Geomagic Studio allows you to work with both physical objects and digital models, closing the loop between clay and software modeling. You can import surface layouts created by a CAD software expert as templates and apply them to points obtained from scanning the clay model created by an artist. Without the barrier between physical and digital, design changes take much less time and effort. (Figure 1: conversion of points to polygons using Geomagic Wrap.)

XXII -2

With Geomagic Studio, it comprises three integrated modules that provide a complete solution for reverse engineering and custom design. There were several different features in which all had a very important purpose. One feature was the Geomagic Capture. It is compatible with any 3-D scanner or digitizer. Capture works the way you work, with the tools you already use. Whether using white light, laser, or touch probe scanners, Capture will improve your workflow. It has Ultra-fast triangulation algorithm, which is if the surface is extremely large, ultra-dense data sets with unprecedented speed and ease. With Multi-threaded operations, you can tap in to the full power of your multi-processor system and get even more speed gains from key functions like Reduce Noise, Shade Points, and Register. You can register scans manually by selecting three points or a single point, then let Capture's AutoFit function fine-tune the alignment, or let Capture do all the work using Global Registration to fully automate the registration process.

The next feature was Geomagic Wrap. It automatically converts points to polygons. It has automated 3D model creation that creates watertight polygonal models and volume meshes from point cloud data, automatically, without approximation. Its 3D photography integration integrates with 3D scanning technologies, including those that capture color data, such as scanners