Manufacturability Analysis for a Sculptured Surface Using Visibility Cone Computation

This paper presents a general algorithm to obtain a feasible tool-approach direction for sculptured surface machining based on convex analysis. The visibility cone which represents the aggregate of all visible directions is constructed to describe geometric constraints. Combined with the convex hull computation algorithm, a detailed procedure for computing the visibility cone has been developed. The visibility cone can be used as an effective tool for manufacturability analysis of the sculptured surface when applied to CNC machining tool-path planning. After the visibility cone is acquired, tool orientation can be adjusted to adapt itself to the local geometry of the sculptured surface at each cut contact position. The proposed methodology can be applied to computer-aided planning and programming of cutter-path generation for 5-axis sculptured-surface machining.