| Abstract: | In real machining, the tool paths are composed of a series of short line segments, which constitute groups of sharp corners correspondingly leading to geometry discontinuity in tangent. As a result, high acceleration with high fluctuation usually occurs. If these kinds of tool paths are directly used for machining, the feedrate and quality will be greatly reduced. Thus, generating continuous tool paths is strongly desired. This paper presents a new error-controllable method for generating continuous tool path. Different from the traditional method focusing on fitting the cutter locations, the proposed method realizes globally smoothing the tool path in an error-controllable way. Concretely, it does the smoothing by approaching the newly produced curve to the linear tool path by taking the tolerance requirement as a constraint. That is, the error between the desired tool path and the G01 commands are taken as a boundary condition to ensure the finally smoothed curve being within the given tolerance. Besides, to improve the smoothing ability in case of small corner angle, an improved local smoothing method is also proposed by symmetrically assigning the control points to the two adjacent linear segments with the constrains of tolerance and G3 continuity. Experiments on an open five-axis machine are developed to verify the advantages of the proposed methods. |
