Abstract
Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) has been an important inspection tool in quality control for several years owing to its high accuracy and precision. Effectiveness of inspection plan generated by CMM greatly depends on measurement cycle time. Lesser the inspection time taken by CMM to measure a given part better will be the performance of inspection process. Therefore, it has been critical to reduce measurement time for efficient performance of inspection process. In this paper, methodologies to generate most suitable measurement path resulting into minimum inspection time has been introduced. These methodologies are based on different algorithms to reduce measurement cycle time for CMM. The different algorithms have successfully been explored and compared to show their effectiveness in minimizing inspection time for stationary CMM equipped with touch trigger probe. The proposed methodologies have also been implemented and tested on real-world mechanical part with certain number of features to demonstrate their applicability. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.