Geometric Reasoning With a Virtual Workforce (Crowdsourcing for CAD/CAM)

Jagadeesan, P. and Wenzel, J. and Corney, J.R. and Yan, X.T. and Sherlock, A. and Regli, W. (2008) Geometric Reasoning With a Virtual Workforce (Crowdsourcing for CAD/CAM). In: VirMan 08 part of the 5th INTUITION International Conference: Virtual Reality in Industry and Society: From Research to Application,, 2008-10-06 - 2008-10-08.

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Abstract

This paper reports the initial results of employing a commercial Crowdsourcing (aka Micro-outsourcing) service to provide geometric analysis of complex 3D models of mechanical components. Although Crowdsourcing sites (which distribute browser based tasks to potentially large numbers of anonymous workers on the Internet) are well established for image analysis and text manipulation there is little academic work on the effectiveness or limitations of the approach. The work reported here describes the initial results of using Crowdsourcing to determine the 'best' canonical, or characteristic, views of complex 3D models of engineering components. The results suggest that the approach is a cheap, fast and effective method of solving what is a computationally difficult problem.