Don’t Know CAD? Just Scan It!

Team: Ada He (ME), Daniel Tian (ME), Sean Zhou (IEOR), Shine Shan (IEOR), William Wu (IEOR)
Advisor: Gabriel Gomez (ME), Eugen Solowjow (Siemens), Chengtao Wen (Siemens)

3D printing technology is not only becoming ever more pervasive in design and manufacturing applications, but it is also making an increasing impact to our daily life. A CAD model is usually required as an input, which are often difficult to create. Our project addresses this problem by providing a cheap and fast 3D scanning solution that creates a 3D mesh straight from existing objects, with the application of a depth camera and a scanning setup prototype. Regardless of your background knowledge of CAD, we help embody your design ideas!

Problem

3D printing technology is not only becoming ever more pervasive in design and manufacturing applications, but it is also making an increasing impact to our daily life. A CAD model is usually required as an input, which are often difficult to create.

Solution

Our project addresses this problem by providing a cheap and fast 3D scanning solution that creates a 3D mesh straight from existing objects, with the application of a depth camera and a scanning setup prototype.

Need

• Set the camera height and angle
• Object automatically rotates with 9° increment
• 3D Model file

Process

RGBD Camera provides raw depth data of surfaces which will be cleaned by an algorithm that eliminates background and noise data, extracting only the object from its surroundings. This outputs transformation matrices to a Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) algorithm that applies transformation matrices to integrate each depth frame into a Voxel Volume in the global coordinate system. Then, the Marching Cube Algorithm generates a set of vertices and triangles from Voxel Volume. Finally, the results can be saved
as an object file ready for viewing and printing using CAD software.