Patent ID: 8578581

Claim:
A method of drilling a plurality of holes in a part, the method comprising: providing a digital model of the part, the model including a nominal surface of the part, coordinates of a nominal location on the nominal surface of each of the holes to be drilled in the part and a nominal orientation of each of the holes with respect to the nominal surface, the nominal surface including digital elements selected from group consisting of points, meshed portions and nurbs; scanning an actual surface of the part to create a digitized actual surface representing the actual surface of the part, the digitized actual surface including digital elements selected from the group consisting of points, meshed portions and nurbs; performing a tridimensional comparison between the digitized actual surface and the nominal surface including determining a corresponding one of the digital elements of the digitized actual surface for each of the digital elements of the nominal surface, determining a relative displacement and rotation between the corresponding digital elements of the digitized actual surface and of the nominal surface, and determining a correlation between the digitized actual surface and the nominal surface; aligning the digitized actual surface and the nominal surface based on the correlation determined by the tridimensional comparison; generating coordinates of an actual location for each of the holes by projecting the coordinates of the nominal location of each of the holes on the digitized actual surface aligned therewith, the actual location corresponding to an individual modification of the nominal location of each of the holes to be drilled to account for differences between the digitized actual surface and the nominal surface around the hole as revealed by the tridimensional comparison; determining an actual orientation of a drilling tool for each of the holes based on the nominal orientation of the hole with respect to the nominal surface and on a difference in orientation between the aligned digitized actual surface and nominal surface around the hole as revealed by the tridimensional comparison between the nominal surface and the digitized actual surface; and drilling each of the holes on the actual surface of the part at the corresponding actual location and following the corresponding actual orientation.