A five-axis dual-NURBS interpolator with constant speed at feedrate-sensitive regions under axial drive constraints

In the five-axis machining, the dual nonuniform rational B-spline (NURBS) interpolator performs better than the conventional linear interpolator in improving machining efficiency and quality. However, a successful dual NURBS interpolator faces with two aspects of issues. First, the feedrate should be reasonably scheduled according to axial drive constraints. Furthermore, the axial trajectories should be precisely and rapidly calculated according to the scheduled feedrate. To schedule the feedrate, existing methods use either overall constant speed or frequent time-varying speed. However, the former one is adverse to the motion efficiency, while the latter one is adverse to the motion stability. To deal with these issues, this study schedules feedrate-sensitive and nonsensitive regions and plans constant speed at the sensitive regions and smooth transition speed within the nonsensitive regions, thus balancing the motion stability and the efficiency. In addition, to calculate the axial trajectories, existing methods, using inverse kinematics, result in multiple solutions due to the existence of antitrigonometric functions, and this requires complicated selection of the solutions, otherwise the axial positions will be discontinuity. To deal with this issue, this study proposes a Jacobi matrix-based Adams prediction-correction numerical algorithm, which uses the incremental value of the tool pose to calculate the consecutive unique solution of the five-axis positions directly. By integrating above techniques, a systematic five-axis dual NURBS interpolator with the constant speed at feedrate-sensitive regions under axial drive constraints is presented. Experimental tests are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.