Research On Efficient Tool Path Planning Of The Stone Relief

With the rapid development of our society,our material and spiritual lives have been greatly improved.The demanding on stone carving products increases gradually.Stone relief products are widely used in building decoration,advertising and other fields.The aesthetic feeling of stone relief products and the requirement of the processing accuracy are also increasing.As a part of the manufacturing industry,stone relief industry has been considered as an important industry to enhance the added value.Personalization and small batch production is an inevitable developing trend for the processing of stone products.Modeling and numerical control machining technology of stone relief products has been widely concerned.On the premise of meet the requirements of processing,the use of numerical control machining technology better and faster for mass production of stone relief products is a worth studying further.The tool path planning is the key procedure of numerical control machining technology and directly affect the feasibility,machining precision and machining efficiency of numerical control machining.The whole stone relief surface is processed by only one tool path method in the present processing of stone relief.Though this method is simple,the tool is limited by the minimum radius of curvature of the stone relief surface.The tool with smaller radius results in the weaker cutting force,more amount of too path,therefore,lower processing efficiency.The efficiency for the processing of stone reliefs can be improved greatly if the surfaces of stone relief are divided and classified and different tools and tool path generation algorithms are used for different surface patches.Base on the calculation and analysis of the geometry parameters and processing parameters of complex surface,a K nearest neighbor algorithm based on the K-d tree is proposed for dividing the complex surface into a series of sub surface regions with the same surface characteristic.The most suitable tool type,tool parameters and cutting tool path generation method are chosen for each processing region.The iso-parameter method and the iso-scallop method are used to generate the tool paths for the flat surfaces and the irregular surfaces,respectably.The algorithm for dividing complex curved surface is developed based on the Point Cloud Library technology by using C++ language.The tool processing path is calculated by Matlab.The simulation results show that the total number and length of tool paths generated by the proposed algorithm reduced greatly compared with those generated by the traditional algorithm,and the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the machining efficiency of the relief surface on the premise of ensuring the machining accuracy.