Development on Virtual 5-axis Milling Machine Tool

摘要

The restriction of a traditional three-axis milling machine in machining complex geometry has resulted in the need in getting more cutting degree of freedom. For example, multi-axis machine has been intensively adopted in machining aerospace components, automobile parts and high-precision mold. However, the investment of a multi-axis CNC machine is very expensive and the use of the machine has very high potential of machine collision owing to its complexity in operation. There is no guarantee for an NC program that has been simulated correctly in CAD/CAM software to work without collision in the real machine operation because full machine is not simulated in a general CAD/CAM and the collision may be caused owing to inadvertent settings of workpiece origin. Therefore, a need has arisen demanding last mile emulation of the toolpath including full machine and work coordinates. The application of virtual reality (VR) technology in developing virtual multi-axis CNC system has been proposed in this paper in resolving the above mentioned problem. A physical 5-axis milling machine has been implemented in verifying the feasibility of the proposed methodology; the concept in integrating virtual controller and virtual machine tool has been successfully realized in this study. Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 has been used for the development of virtual controller in emulating the physical controller. The developed virtual controller has been smoothly integrated with VR scene based on EON Studio software environment. Internet has also been integrated in facilitating a network-based CNC tutoring system for training, NC programming, and complex multi-axis machining processes through virtual CNC operation learning.