Flat-end cutter accessibility determination in 5-axis milling of sculptured surfaces

Abstract

In this paper, a point-based method is developed to check whether a flat-end cutter is able to finish the entire sculptured surface without any interference in 5-axis milling. In order to reduce the heavy computation load, the surface is firstly decomposed into interference-prone and interference-free regions by considering the local surface geometry and the cutter's geometry. At the point within the interference-prone regions, a comprehensive search algorithm has been developed to find the accessible posture range for a given cutter in terms of the tilting and rotational angles. The constraints considered in cutter accessibility determination include machine's axis limit, localgouging, rear-gouging, and global-collision. Examples are given to show the validity, efficacy and robustness of the developed methods.