An application of shape grammars to planning for CNC machining

Planning for Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) fabrication requires generation of process plans for the fabrication of parts that can be executed on CNC enabled machine tools. To create such plans, a large amount of domain specific knowledge is required to map the desired geometry of a part to a manufacturing process, thus decomposing design information into a set of feasible machining operations. Approaches to automate this planning process still rely heavily on human capabilities, such as planning and reasoning about geometry in relation to machining capabilities. In this paper, the authors present a new, shape grammar-based approach for automatically creating fabrication plans for CNC machining from a given part geometry. To avoid the use of static feature sets and their pre-defined mappings to machining operations, the method encodes knowledge of fundamental machine capabilities. A method for generating a vocabulary of removal volume shapes based on the available tool set and machine tool motions is defined in combination with a basic rule set for shape removal covering tool motion, removal volume calculation and CNC code generation. The use of shape grammars as a formalism enables systematic formulation of hard and soft constraints on spatial relations between the volume to be removed and the removal volume shape for a machining operation. The method is validated using an example of machining a simple part on a milling machine. Overall, the approach and method presented is an enabler for the creation of an autonomous fabrication system and CNC machine tools that are able to reason about part geometry in relation to available capabilities and carry out on-line planning for CNC fabrication.     «

Planning for Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) fabrication requires generation of process plans for the fabrication of parts that can be executed on CNC enabled machine tools. To create such plans, a large amount of domain specific knowledge is required to map the desired geometry of a part to a manufacturing process, thus decomposing design information into a set of feasible machining operations. Approaches to automate this planning process still rely heavily on human capabilities, such as p...     »