Automatic Inspection of Flexible Parts Using Virtual Fixturing

Abstract

A flexible part has no unique shape until it is constrained, which makes dimensional inspection difficult. Standard practice clamps it in a dedicated jig and probes it with a coordinate measuring machine or a range sensor. We replace the jig with virtual fixturing. From partial range views of the unfixtured part, the pipeline recovers a coarse pose between the scan and the CAD model using a robust geodesic bilateral curvature algorithm, deforms the model towards the scan by non-rigid registration, and computes deviations along the model surface normal to decide whether the part is in tolerance. On a prismatic part and a game-controller housing, the method is more accurate than optimal-step non-rigid ICP, radial basis function FEM, and coherent point drift, because the generated deformations come from an operator closely related to the proposed method’s own regularizer, those margins favor it by construction and are reported with that caveat. On a generated thin-shell test part the measurement uncertainty of the implementation is measured at about 0.039 mm, dominated by the registration rather than by the sensor. The pipeline is then exercised on a physically scanned injection-molded engine cover, a 612 mm part whose free-state residual against its nominal model is 4.62 mm at the verified global optimum. No independent coordinate-measuring-machine reference was available for that part, so this experiment is reported as a free-state residual and a controlled comparison with and without the feature set, not as a statement of absolute measurement accuracy.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Machines, 2026 · DOI ↗