Arbitrary shape reconstruction from NC sectional data and applications in space cutter compensation and interference detection

This paper proposes an efficient shape reconstruction method from sectional data in 3-axis Numerical Control (NC) machining. A merge-divide algorithm is proposed to construct triangle meshes for machined surfaces with arbitrary shape and genus. The algorithm is of linear complexity due to the special property of the NC data. The method is used to interference detection and space cutter compensation in 3-axis NC machining. Experimental results verify that our method gives efficient and valid solutions to these important problems in NC machining.