Session: DAC-13-01 Geometric Modeling and Algorithms for Design and Manufacturing

Paper Number: 68081

Start Time: August 18, 10:00 AM

68081 - Fast Cutter Location Surface Computation Using Ray Tracing Cores 

Most machine product components are manufactured using molds and dies. In the case of automobiles, body parts are formed using stamping dies. Engine parts and interior parts are usually produced using die casting and injection molding, respectively. It is estimated that the cost for fabricating molds and dies is 40% of the total manufacturing cost of an automobile. There is therefore strong demand for technology to manufacture molds and dies more quickly and inexpensively. Molds and dies are usually fabricated using 3-axis NC milling machines with ball-end, flat-end, and/or radius-end cutters. The NC machine drives a cutter according to a prescribed cutter path, which represents the trajectory of the reference point of the cutter in the milling process. In the ball-end cutter case, the center point of the spherical blade is typically used as the reference point.

By using the cutter location (CL) surface, fast and stable computation of the cutter path for machining complicated molds and dies can be realized. State-of-the-art graphics processing units (GPUs) are equipped with special hardware named ray tracing (RT) cores dedicated to image processing (called ray tracing) for 3D computer graphics. Using RT cores, it is possible to quickly compute the intersection points between a set of straight lines and polygons. In this paper, we propose a novel CL surface computation method using the RT core. The RT core was originally designed to accelerate 3D computer graphics processing. For the development of software using RT cores, it is necessary to use the OptiX application programming interface (API) library for computer graphics. We demonstrate how to use the OptiX API in the development of software for CL surface computations. Computational experiments were carried out, and it was confirmed that it is possible to obtain the CL surface based on a very high-resolution Z-map several times faster than the depth buffer-based method, which has been considered to be the fastest to date.

Presenting Author: Daiki Ishii Ibaraki University

Authors:

Daiki Ishii Ibaraki University
Masatomo Inui Ibaraki University
Nobuyuki Umezu Ibaraki University