GENERATING CARTESIAN NC TOOL PATHS FOR SCULPTURED SURFACE MANUFACTURE

A computationally efficient Cartesian path generation algorithm is proposed. The proposed tool path generation procedure is essentially a two-step process. The first step subdivides the sculptured surface into subpatches until the subdivision is good enough to satisfy the user-defined approximation tolerance. The second step generates the Cartesian tool paths from the polyhedral approximation of the surface while the deviation of the tool paths from the true surface stays within the user-specified tolerance. This algorithm optimizes the cutter movements by minimizing the number of interpolated points. The Cartesian tool path generation procedure is implemented in C on a SUN 4/65 workstation as a module in an integrated sculptured surface design and manufacturing (ISSDM) system.