| The main objective of this research is to make contributions towards the construction of an integrated CAD/CAM and CMM system for sculptured surfaces by suggesting and developing new methods in the areas of (1) simulation and verification of the CNC tool path, (2) CNC tool path planning, and (3) the CMM measuring method.;For the measuring method, the offset surface technique was introduced to obtain accurate surface point data by eliminating normal directional error caused by alignment. The effectiveness of the new measuring method was also shown through experiment.;For the CNC tool path planning, two methods, parametric and offset parametric, were developed in order to obtain the fewest number of cutter location points while maintaining the required machining tolerance. The new parametric method generated fewer cutter location points than the conventional methods but attained an unacceptable machining tolerance as well as the conventional methods. The new offset parametric method, which consists of two main computational techniques, offset surface generation algorithm and offset tool path planning algorithm, successfully compensated for the machining tolerance. The effectiveness of new method was demonstrated through computer verification and experimentation. |
