On-machine Inspection for FreeCAD

On-machine Inspection (OMI) is a valuable tool used in CNC commercial manufacturing to ensure proper tolerances of the manufactured piece. This is done by attaching a probe to the tool head of the machine and scanning the surface of the finalised product to see if there are discrepancies between the expected result and actual measurements. Including such a tool on FreeCAD, which already has a dedicated set of tools for CNC milling in the Path Workbench, will not only bring it closer to proprietary solutions but even surpass some of them that don't have this feature. This would save time for the machinist and also increase the inherent accuracy of the whole process. Building upon this, sensing solutions can introduce novel approaches to improve the CAM workflow and even generate new solutions not seen before. This proposal argues for an automatized post-processing of, for example, 3D prints by milling them to correct tolerances and inherent defects of the manufacturing process like layer patterns, over-extrusion or limited resolution. For On-machine inspection, there are already commercial solutions available so it's a matter of replicating their implementations on Python for FreeCAD. For the post-processing tool, a more involved overview of optimization algorithms for closely-matching volumes will be needed but it's surely available in the literature. If not, my background in mathematics and physics should prove valuable in the development of such an algorithm. Thus, the main goals for the proposal are to prodive the FreeCAD Path Workbench with two new tools, On-machine Inspection and automatized post-processing of already manufactured pieces, and also to properly test and document these new tools in the FreeCAD wiki.