A Cyber Physical System with GPU for CNC Applications

In this paper, we parallelize the collision detection of five-axis machining as an example to show how to execute CNC applications on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). We first design and implement an efficient collision detection tool, including the kinematics analyses for five-axis motions, separating axis method for collision detection, and computer simulation for verification. The machine structure is modeled as STL format in CAD software. The input to the detection system is the g-code part program, which describes the tool motions to produce the part surface. Then the g-code will be partitioned and be executed by our collision detection tool in parallel on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The system simulates the five-axis CNC motion for tool trajectory and detects any collisions according to the input g-codes. The result shows that our method can improve the performance of computational efficiency significantly when comparing to the conventional detection method.