Development of CAM System for 5-Axis NURBS Interpolated Machining (Tool Path Generation Utilizing Interference-Free Space)

Nowadays, it is essential to shorten the production time and to make high quality products at low costs since consumer-needs are becoming diversified. To meet this high requirement, it is expected that 5-axis NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline) interpolated machining be put into practical use. 5-axis NURBS interpolated NC data are generally defined by transforming linear interpolated NC data into NURBS interpolated ones. Therefore, the approximation error is consequently included in calculated tool paths due to the use of the linear interpolated data. On the other hand, the main-processors have been developed, which can generate NURBS interpolated CL data directly from CAD modeling data. It is very useful, however there is a problem of taking a long calculation time to generate CL data since the interference avoidance is considered for each tool path. Therefore, the study develops an useful CAM system, which can automatically generate practical 5-axis NURBS interpolated NC data, utilizing the interference-free space. As a result, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated from the feasibility experiments.