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Abstract
Tool path generation is an interesting and challenging task in free-form surface machining. Iso-planar tool path generation is one of the common approaches to dealing with this task. However, it suffers from an inherent drawback that intersecting intervals of the iso-planar method are limited to surface geometric features. This results in poor machining efficiency in flat regions due to redundant machining paths. For this problem, a new tool path generation method for triangular meshes is proposed based on the least-squares conformal map (LSCM). After LSCM parameterisation with minimal stretching energy, the triangular meshes are unfolded on a plane, where the principal component analysis (PCA) technique is employed to determine a suitable drive line for calculating cutter contact paths by the iso-planar strategy. Therefore, the tool paths are generated in a plane and the unevenness of the traditional iso-planar method is improved. The feasibility and effectiveness of the developed method is demonstrated through a test experiment.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia for providing open platform Graphite for implementing LSCM parameterisation, and Zhichao Zhao from Huazhong University of Science and Technology for implementing the experiments. The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (50835004 and 50625516) and the 863 program of China (2009AA042149).