Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

The research describes part of a "Pipeline of De-sign and Manufacturing Tools" for product de-signers who are driven by short delivery-times. The overall project has been called CyberCut be-cause the modules can interoperate in a distrib-uted, Internet-based environment. This particular paper focuses on tool path generation of sculp-tured surfaces using 3-axis CNC machines. Im-portance is given to generating cutter location points that will meet the tolerance requirement while maintaining a certain surface finish. Sec-tions of the paper describe: a) the offset-generation method, b) the tool path generation scheme and c) the tool holder collision detection algorithm. The algorithms that have been devel-oped are used to machine sample parts.