Automatic generation of probe path for surface inspection and part alignment

A system comprising:

• a data processing apparatus including at least one hardware processor;
• and
• a non-transitory computer-readable medium encoding instructions of a computer-aided design program, the instructions being configured to cause the data processing apparatus to obtain a mesh model of at least a portion of a three dimensional model of a part to be manufactured using a computer-controlled manufacturing system;
• collect vertex points from the mesh model to be an initial set of probing points in a three dimensional space of a working coordinate system of the computer-controlled manufacturing system;
• filter out points from the initial set of probing points based on coverage of the at least a portion of the three dimensional model of the part to produce a final set of probing points in the three dimensional space of the working coordinate system of the computer-controlled manufacturing system;
• and
• provide the final set of probing points for use in alignment or surface inspection of the part by the computer-controlled manufacturing system.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium encoding instructions operable to cause data processing apparatus to perform operations comprising:

• obtaining a mesh model of at least a portion of a three dimensional model of a part to be manufactured using a computer-controlled manufacturing system;
• collecting vertex points from the mesh model to be an initial set of probing points in a three dimensional space of a working coordinate system of the computer-controlled manufacturing system;
• filtering out points from the initial set of probing points based on coverage of the at least a portion of the three dimensional model of the part to produce a final set of probing points in the three dimensional space of the working coordinate system of the computer-controlled manufacturing system;
• and
• providing the final set of probing points for use in alignment or surface inspection of the part by the computer-controlled manufacturing system.