SBIR-STTR Award

Design information for most of America's infrastructure is held as paper blueprints and paper specifications. It is estimated that 10 billion sheets of paper drawings exist for state and federal projects alone. Yet to perform necessary modern engineering analysis on these drawings, the blueprints must be in electronic form, not paper form. Present methods to convert these paper drawing to digital form are slow, expensive, and error prone. Making an electronic copy is 40 to 90 times more expensive than making a paper copy, a cost of $800 billion to $1.8 trillion dollars to convert all existing drawings to electronic formats. This research will develop new frameworks and algorithms to reduce the cost of converting a paper blueprint to electronic format. These new methods will reduce costs by a factor of ten and will improve the quality of the finished conversion. The research will combine recent advances in scanner technology, advances in algorithm technology, and government advances in modeling languages to make these improvements possible. Anticipated Benefits/Potential Applications - This research will provide an inexpensive, accurate, and seamless method to capture the original semantic intent of the paper blueprints, and will be an enabling technology for improving existing products and structures.

Design information for most of America's products and civil infrastructure is held as paper blueprints and paper specifications. About 10 billion sheets of paper drawings exist for state and federal projects alone. Yet to perform modern engineering analysis on these paper drawings, the blueprints must be in electronic form, not paper form. Present methods to convert paper blueprints to digital form require an engineer to physically trace each blueprint into electronic form. This makes the work expensive, slow, and error prone. Making an electronic copy is now 40 to 90 times more expensive than making a Xerox copy of the same blueprint. If all government blueprints were converted to electronic form, this would cost $800 billion to $1.8 trillion dollars using current methods. Phase I SBIR research documented that computer-directed conversion of blueprints to electronic formats is now technically feasible. By building on prior research efforts, Phase I research developed several new algorithms that reduced processing times for this conversion from eight hours to ten minutes per sheet. Phase II research will build on Phase I results, will develop additional algorithms, and will integrate these algorithms with robust IGES and STEP based translators. At the completion of Phase II, a commercial product will exist that can reduce costs by a factor of ten and improve blueprint quality, while retaining the semantic content of the original blueprints. A large potential market exists for this product. In addition to electronic conversion of ten billion drawings, this product will enable immediate analysis of earthquake damage and fire damage. The product will make it economically feasible to examine existing nuclear power plants, aircraft, and buildings for latent stresses and defects.