Collision-free tool motion planning for 5-axis CNC machining with toroidal cutters

Abstract

Collision detection is a crucial part of CNC machining, however, many state-of-the-art algorithms test collisions as a post-process, after the path-planning stage, or use conservative approaches that result in low machining accuracy in the neighborhood of the cutter's contact paths. We propose a fast collision detection test that does not require a costly construction of the configuration space nor high-resolution sampling of the cutter's axis and uses the information of the neighboring points to efficiently prune away points of the axis that cannot cause collisions. The proposed collision detection test is incorporated directly as a part of the tool motion-planning stage, enabling design of highly-accurate motions of a toroidal cutting tool along free-form geometries. We validate our algorithm on a variety of benchmark surfaces, showing that our results provide high-quality approximations with provably non-colliding motions.