Research On Path Optimization Algorithm For Laser Cutting

Laser cutting is an important technology in laser processing industry and is widely used in the industry. In the cutting process, there will be a lot of air travel, through the CAM software to optimize the cutting path to reduce the air travel, can increase productivity. Therefore, there is a larger theoretical value and practical significance.In this thesis, according to the characteristics of the laser cutting, we extract the outline of the sheet metal parts. The outline of the parts is made up of loops, and loop is made up of vertexes and edges. The path optimization is to determine the position of the drilling points and the cutting ring scheduling order.To solve this problem, we use the ant colony algorithms to optimization the path. The idea of the ant colony algorithm is based on the phenomenon that ants colony can find a shortest path from their nest to the food. This algorithm was successfully applied to solving the TSP problem. Based on its mathematical model, we developed a CPU running program. Experimental results show that the algorithm is effective and has good stability.Although the ant colony algorithm has a better effect, there is a defect which is the computing time is too long due to the inherent complexity of the path optimization. For this shortcoming, this article uses GPU to accelerate the algorithm. GPU computing is more powerful than CPU. It is suitable for large-scale, fine-grained parallel computing. Compared with the tradition CPU programming, GPU programming has a huge difference. We use the GPU to compute the module which will spend plenty of time in this algorithm. Result shows that it can greatly increase the speed of the complexity path optimization.This algorithm has been applied to the laser cutting software, and can be used to the rapid prototyping and other manufacture filed.