A Novel Method for Achieving Minimum Distance Collision-free Tool Path for Drilling

- In recent years, many researchers have studied drilling tool path generation. Tool travelling time is a major portion of overall manufacturing time particularly in large scale items to be drilled. Nowadays, tool path is selected from a set of regular tool paths offered in CAM systems. These tool paths are mostly far from being the optimum path. In this paper, a new Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is utilized for generating a safe tool path in drilling processes. The developed optimization model can handle the objective function under multiple constraints, namely, returning to the tool origin rather than the initial hole to be drilled, considering all workpiece dimensions/corners for the initial position of the drill bit, as well as an obstacle constraint to generate a collision free trajectory. Performance of the proposed model is obtained for different initial tool positions on all corners of the workpiece. The results prove that the model can solve the problem in a timely manner and is able to generate an optimum safe path for tool traverse.