A STEP-compliant Approach to NC Programming of Freeform Surfaces

摘要

In order to realize STEP compliant NC manufacturing, STEP-NC (ISO 14649) has been developed over last decade by the International Standard Organization as a new data model for CNC programming. This paper proposes a framework for STEP compliant NC programming of the freeform surfaces. The system is supposed to read the CAD model produced by commercial CAD/CAM software and represented in STEP format, prepare the process information, and finally generate the STEP-NC compliant program. Major issues relating to CAD data extraction, toolpath calculation and NC program generation are presented.