On the Generation of Coordinated Motion of Five-Axis CNC/CMM Machines

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical study on the command generation for five-axis CNC machining or CMM measurement. In the integration of CAD and CAM, it is necessary to relate machine tool kinematics and control in a CAM process to the geometrical data in a CAD model. The data stored in a CAD model is usually static in nature and represented by unitless parameters. Yet, in machine tool motion and control, the data should be transformed into a time dependent domain. In this paper, a general theory on the conversion from desired paths to motion trajectory is analytically derived. The geometrical properties of a desired path, including position, tangent, and curvature are related to the kinematics of coordinated motion including feedrate, acceleration and jerk. As a result, the motion commands used as control references to track arbitrary space curves for five-axis computer-controlled machines can be generated in a rather straight-forward as well as systematic way.