LASER-SCANNING AND QUASI-HELICAL TOOL PATH DEFINITION OF ARBITRARY CURVED SURFACE MODELS

In rapid prototyping it is frequently necessary to define and CNC machine the complete surface form of complex three-dimensional shapes. In this work arbitrary curved surfaces are digitized by rotating them in angular increments and acquiring lines of surface data points at each angular position, with a triangulation-based laser range finder. The laser scanner data is filtered. and reconstructed, so that cutter offsets and quasi-helical toolpaths for CNC machining can be directly formed. The approach may he used for machining basically any type of object and is not limited to true surfaces of revolution. A scanned and CNC machined perfume bottle is used as an example to illustrate the capabilities of this approach.