A cutter orientation modification method for five-axis ball-end machining with kinematic constraints

Cutter orientation modification with kinematic constraints is very necessary and effective for five-axis machining especially machining at high speed. It is very helpful for achieving a smooth cutter motion and keeping the process steady. Therefore, a cutter orientation adjustment method is proposed to obtain an optimized tool path which makes best use of the kinematic characteristics of angular feed for five-axis machining. For the given five-axis cutter location path and the feed profile of cutter tip point both expressed by b-spline formats with the same parameterization, the analytic relations of angular feed, angular feed acceleration, and jerk with respect to the geometric and tangential feed parameters of the cutter tip trajectory are first derived. Then, the conditional inequalities of these kinematic constraints used for orientation adjustment are built. Subsequently, the determination method of feasible cutter orientation and detailed algorithm of orientation adjustment are given. Finally, illustrated examples are conducted to validate the proposed orientation adjustment method. The results show that the developed method is effective and can be applied to optimize geometrically complex five-axis tool path by taking the angular feed, angular feed acceleration, and jerk into account.