Identification and looping tool path generation for removing residual areas left by pocket roughing

Abstract

For pocket with complex geometry shape, lots of residuals will be left after pocket roughing. These uncut regions always are around sharp corners, bottlenecks, and sidewalls with small areas and soft edges. Additionally, as most of the stock material has been removed, the thin wall between two adjacent pockets tends to deform when machining the residuals. Thus, certain technological requirements such as starting from the soft edge, retaining down-milling, and keeping constant feed rate are needed to machine the unmachined materials. However, little research has been carried out on this problem. In this paper, to remove the various uncut areas left by the pocket roughing, residual regions are identified first by the rolling disk motion method. Then, looping tool paths are designed and computed for corner, bottleneck, and sidewall residuals respectively. The proposed tool path satisfies down-milling, G1 continuous, and progressive radial depth of cut with consideration of the soft edge. Finally, an example is rendered to validate that the advised algorithm can identify the remained areas correctly, and the generated tool path meets the special requirements of clean-up regions machining.