In this paper, a novel approach for five-axis toolpath planning taking tool swept volumes and machining performance into account has been introduced. The toolpath generation is based on cutting planes slicing a meshed surface to provide toolpath tracks on the surface. The cutting planes can be orthogonal to each other, and positions of these planes are computed consequently so that a next iteration considers regions machined at the previous iterations. The developed algorithm alternates between several candidate tracks to ensure that a track with the best performance, which may be formulated variously, is selected. Each candidate track is computed to result in a tool swept volume that completely removes stock material between the toolpath track and the boundary of the un-machined region. Several planning strategies can be applied in order to obtain a machined surface with scallop height not exceeding a given value.
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