Title: Distribution of motion for five-axis machine tools utilising quasi-redundancy

Authors: Titus Haas; Sascha Weikert; Konrad Wegener

Addresses: Institute of Machine Tools and Manufacturing, ETH Zurich, Leonhardstrasse 21, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland; Inspire AG, Technoparkstrasse 1, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland ' Inspire AG, Technoparkstrasse 1, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland ' Institute of Machine Tools and Manufacturing, ETH Zurich, Leonhardstrasse 21, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland

Abstract: A new approach for the distribution of motion for five-axis machine tools, using quasi-redundancy given by the tolerance values of the rotational axes, is presented in this paper. Depending on the directional manufacturing tolerances for a geometry, the tolerance space is introduced. Allowing only small rotational tolerances, the nonlinear transformations are approximated using the small angle assumption. The optimisation problem is formulated as quadratic programming problem using B-Splines to represent the optimised solution. Based on two application examples, it is shown that the machining time and the machine excitation for desired machine axes can be reduced by the algorithm presented in this paper.

Keywords: movement division; five-axis machine tools; set point generation; quasi-redundancy; machine excitation; productivity; quadratic programming; B-splines; motion distribution; tolerance values; rotational axes; rotational tolerances; nonlinear transformations; optimisation; machining time.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMMS.2016.079593

International Journal of Mechatronics and Manufacturing Systems, 2016 Vol.9 No.3, pp.254 - 271

Received: 26 Dec 2015
Accepted: 02 Apr 2016
Published online: 04 Oct 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article