A NEW APPROACH FOR THE MATHEMATICAL ALIGNMENT MACHINE TOOL-PATHS ON A FIVE-AXIS MACHINE AND ITS EFFECT ON SURFACE ROUGHNESS

• Boukebbab Salim
• Chaves-Jacob Julien
• Linares Jean-Marc
• Azzam Noureddine

This paper proposes a procedure to adapt the geometry of the toolpath to remove a constant thickness on a five-axis machine. The aim of this work is to contribute to the automation of prosthesis machining, mainly, in the preparation of polishing surface. The proposed method can deform and adapt a toolpath to respect the geometry of the manufactured surface. This method is based on three steps: alignment, deformation and smoothing toolpath. In the alignment step, a mapping is carried out between the measured surface of prostheses and the nominal toolpath using the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. The aligned toolpath is deformed in two steps. The first step is the projection of aligned points on the measured surface (defined by STL file). In the second step, these points are offset by a value (a(p)) to obtain the required geometry. During the deformation step a meshed surface is used, reducing the smoothness of the deformed toolpath. Experimental tests on industrial prostheses are conducted to validate the effectiveness of this method. During these tests the effects of the smoothing methods on the surface quality of machined parts are presented.