Model predictive tool-path planning
Overview
- Our Advanced CAM Solutions, enhanced with custom process simulations, streamline manufacturing by offering precise and efficient tool-path planning. These systems adapt to your unique demands, significantly reducing reliance on trial-and-error methods and accelerating production.
Benefits
- Shorter lead time: Our automated CAM systems dramatically improve tool-path planning time, reducing production time and cost.
- Customizable Objectives: Tailored to your specific needs, these systems ensure optimal performance with respect to relevant metrics.
- Enhanced Product Quality: Implementing our advanced simulations leads to higher quality products with consistent manufacturing precision and reduced lead time.
For many complex industrial processes tool-path planning cannot be made first time right. Typically, heuristic planners provide an initial plan that is refined through trial and error during production, which is very time consuming and often no suitable tool-path can be found and serious compromises in part quality have to be made.
To address this issue, we are developing ultra-fast, data-driven process models that can be automatically calibrated in-line. These models we then use to calculate optimal toolpaths with respect to specific evaluation metrics and setup constraints, utilizing advanced, and most often custom optimization techniques.
We currently focus on Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) and thermal spraying. In WAAM, we are exploring a reinforcement learning-based planning approach that leverages uncertainty predictions our model provides. In thermal spraying, we are applying nonlinear optimization methods to optimize toolpaths, benefiting from the differentiability of the developed model. In the future, we plan to extend our work to other processes and employ machine learning techniques for generating initial paths, aiming to enable fully automated toolpath generation directly from CAD designs.