Towards Automated Drafting in CAD Systems

Abstract

The drafting or technical drawing of mechanical parts is a common activity during the phase of detailed design. Traditionally, engineering drawings are created manually by draftspersons with the support of CAD software, which is a time-consuming and error-prone task, requiring significant experience and a high level of technical expertise. To automate and accelerate this task, the present work introduces a new automatic drafting tool named iDrafter which enables the creation of 2D engineering drawings out of the 3D model's boundary representation (B-Rep). The iDrafter algorithm has been developed using a state-of-the-art CAD system Application Programming Interface (API) and incorporated into this system. The tool covers not only the dimensioning, but also other aspects of automatic drafting such as the creation of the drawing document, drawing sheet, and the corresponding views. To verify the algorithm, different CAD models have been subjected to testing.