Postprocessor development of a five-axis machine tool with nutating head and table configuration

The postprocessor is an important interface that transforms cutter location data into machine control data, and in a five-axis machine tool is highly complex because the simultaneous linear and rotary motions occur. Since most works of the five-axis postprocessor method have dealt only with the orthogonal machine tool’s configuration, this study presents a postprocessor scheme for two types of five-axis machine tools, each with a nutating head and a table whose rotational axes are in an inclined plane. The benefit of such a configuration is that it allows switching from vertical to horizontal machining by a single machine. The general analytical equations of NC data are obtained from the forward and inverse kinematics and the homogeneous coordinate transformation matrix. The linearization algorithm for the postprocessor is developed to ensure the machining accuracy. The presented algorithm is implemented using a window-based five-axis postprocessor with nutating axes, and programmed in Borland C++ Builder and OpenGL. A simulation is performed using solid cutting software and a trial-cut experiment was conducted on a five-axis machine tool with a nutating table to elucidate the accuracy of the proposed scheme.