High-speed contouring control with NURBS-based C2 PH spline curves

This paper presents a C² Pythagorean hodograph (PH) spline curve constructed by the non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) curve for high-speed contouring control. With the knot vector, weights, and control points given, the C² PH spline curve is defined to be a “good” interpolant for Hermit data obtained from a NURBS curve of degree 3 specified by the same control polygon, weights, and the knot vector. To this end, the first- and second-order derivatives are evaluated at the nodal points on the NURBS curve. These boundary conditions are imposed on the PH segments of degree 9 to preserve continuity between the connecting segments. The S-curve motion planning architecture with variable feed rate for a planar NURBS-based C² PH spline curve is also developed in this paper. In particular, C¹ cubic feed acceleration/deceleration is imposed on the first and last PH segments. Several NURBS-based C² PH spline curve-following tasks were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed interpolation algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed interpolator is not only feasible for machining the complicated parametric curves represented in the NURBS-based C² PH spline form but also yields satisfactory contouring performance under variable feed rate control.