Accessibility analysis for the automatic inspection of mechanical parts by coordinate measuring machines

An overall strategy for inspection planning is discussed, and attention is focused on local and global accessibility cones and on algorithms for computing and clustering them. The direction-cone clusters serve to generate a minimal set of directions for inspecting a part. The algorithms are based primarily on the computation on Gaussian images and Minkowski (or sweeping) operations. Applications to computer vision and automatic machining are briefly presented.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>