Motion and Virtual Cutting Simulation System for a Five-Axis Virtual Machine Tool

Abstract

Since five-axis machine tools are very costly and their use requires a high level of knowledge and expertise, a virtual machine tool must be used to simulate five-axis machine tool operation. Configuration code or a mechanism topology matrix must be used to describe a machine tool, and can be used as the framework for design of a virtual machine tool system. The first step is to isolate the basic motions of each element of a virtual machine tool and then establish their coordinate systems. The establishment of a node tree allows coordinate transformation matrices for virtual motion components to be derived, which are then used to simulate movements. The simulation of virtual cutting must take into consideration both accuracy and efficiency. While either a GPU or CPU can be used to perform calculations, there are currently restrictions on GPU memory use which results in relatively lower accuracy. In contrast, a CPU can perform calculations using an adaptive octree with voxels and multithreading to yield sufficient accuracy and efficiency. A five-axis virtual machine tool motion and virtual cutting simulation system was written in C/C++ with OpenGL and OpenMP, and can perform real-time cutting simulations.