Automated machinability checking for sculptured surface manufacture

Determining tool-approach directions is an important issue when an effort is made to transfer CAD data into manufacturing automatically. An algorithm is developed to determine whether a given part can be machined on a three-axis milling machine. lf a set of feasible tool-approach directions exists for a sculptured surface, the NC tool path and G-codes for machining the surface on a three-axis milling machine can be generated automatically by an NC tool path generation algorithm. The algorithm can be used for orientation and fixturing of the workpiece for interference free machining. The algorithm can also be applied to checking the translational separability of polyhedral parts in automatic assembly.