Corner rounding of linear five-axis tool path by dual PH curves blending

The widespread linear five-axis tool path (G01 blocks) is usually described by two trajectories. One trajectory describes the position of the tool tip point, and the other one describes the position of the second point on the tool axis. The inherent disadvantages of linear tool path are tangential and curvature discontinuities at the corners in five-axis tool path, which will result in feedrate fluctuation and decrease due to the kinematic constraints of the machine tools. In this paper, by using a pair of quintic PH curves, a smoothing method is proposed to round the corners. There are two steps involved in our method. Firstly, according to the accuracy requirements of the tool tip contour and tool orientation tolerances, the corner is rounded with a pair of PH curves directly. Then, the control polygon lengths of PH curves are adjusted simply to guarantee the continuous variation of the tool orientation at the junctions between the transition curves and the remainder linear segments. Because the PH curves for corner rounding can be constructed without any iteration, and those two rounded trajectories are synchronized linearly in interpolation, which makes this smoothing method can be applied in a high efficiency way. Its high computational efficiency allows it to be implemented in real-time applications. This method has been integrated into a CNC system with an open architecture to implement on-line linear five-axis tool path smoothing. Simulations and experiments validate its practicability and reliability. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.