Efficient tool posture global collision-free area generation for 5-axis point clouds machining

This paper presents a method of tool posture global collision-free area generation for 5-axis machining point clouds. For obtaining precise collision-free area efficiently, discrete inclination angles and their collision-free rotation angle ranges are calculated to construct the area in two-dimensional configuration space (C-space), which avoids mapping obstacles to C-space or searching boundaries. An equation is derived to calculate the maximum available angle tolerance between an inclination angle and its neighboring angle. For collision-free rotation angle ranges, possible colliding cells containing data points are obtained to calculate the approximations of ranges quickly. An efficient iterative algorithm based on distances is presented to search critical colliding points to calculate theoretical ranges, which effectively avoids unnecessary additional computation. Finally, the collision-free area in C-space is constructed by the calculated collision-free rotation angle ranges of all inclination angles. Two typical point clouds are tested by the presented method, and the calculation results illustrate the feasibility to be implemented.