GENERATION & VERIFICATION OF CNC PART PROGRAMS FOR PRISMATIC PARTS

Abstract

Manual CNC part program preparation is an error prone process. All CNC part programs arriving at. the machine must gain the confidence of machine operator as he has no time to check. However, there is no guarantee that the part program is error free when it leaves the programmer's desk. Even programs generated by CAM systems contain logic and other errors though they may be relatively free of syntax errors. Therefore, verification of part program is essential before it is downloaded on CNC machine for production. On-line verification of the part program - is lengthy and suffers adversely from the fact that expensive CNC machine is tied up in the process. Simulated verification of part program offers off line facility of checking a CNC part program. This work presents an approach for knowledge based. generation of error "free CNC programs and simulated verification of existing part programs for prismatic parts. A CNC part program is generated by entering it through keyboard or a spreadsheet based part program manuscript. The generated or existing CNC part program can be verified against syntax errors, motion errors & other logic errors and common errors such as tool collision etc. Finally a 2D tool path is generated for graphical verification. A CNC part program -check is very expensive in terms of time and human resources if it is done manually. The developed software provides support for easy and quick generation of error free CNC part programs and verification of existing part program against errors for a selected or user defined controller on a Windows OS based PC. Thus non productive time on the CNC Machine is reduced considerably. The software can also be used as a simulated training/ experimentation facility for CNC part programming in virtual environment