Haptic Sculpting and 5-Axis Pencil-Cut Planning in Virtual Prototyping and Manufacturing
In this paper, a Two-phase approach to tool collision detection and local gouging elimination is proposed for haptic pencil-cut of sculptured surfaces. Pencil-cut is a special kind of machining operation, whose purpose is to use relatively smaller tools to remove rest material on the corners or highly curved regions that are inaccessible by bigger tools. Tool orientation determination and tool collision avoidance are critical issues for 5-axis pencil-cut tool path planning. Detailed techniques of haptic rendering and tool interference avoidance are discussed for haptic-aided 5-axis pencil-cut tool path generation. Hardware and software implementation of the haptic pencil-cut system with practical examples are also presented in this paper.