Form and orientation tolerance analysis for cylindrical surfaces in computer-aided inspection

This paper presents the development of computational algorithms for tolerance analysis from measured geometric data in computer-aided inspection. Computational geometry based techniques and numerical analysis methods are applied to tolerance analysis for cylindrical surfaces in a computer-aided automatic inspection environment. When a set of measured coordinates is given, 2-D convex hulls and voronoi diagrams are used to generate pairs of concentric circles. These circles are used to simulate the inspected surface and to find a pair of concentric cylinders to create the minimum zone required for form tolerance (i.e. the cylindricity) analysis. The analysis of orientation tolerances for cylindrical surfaces with respect to datum surfaces is also discussed.