Automatic sculptured five-axis milling with check surfaces

An approach to 5-axis milling of B-spline surfaces is presented. Within its domain, it provides better check surface handling than APT. The scheme for tool position generation is based on a B-spline curve refinement method and a set of criteria for tolerance control which allows the tool positions to be automatically determined by a set of user specified tolerances. The approach has been used to generate the tool paths for a relatively complex sculptured model, and shows promising results.