PowerMILL 2019.1 – Collision Avoidance and increased C axis stability- Autodesk

MTD recently had Autodesk’s Clinton Perry on the sofa to provide a ‘tech talk’ on the latest developments to the company’s PowerMill CAM software. In this edition, Clinton runs through the new interactive collision avoidance features within PowerMill. 

Running us through the latest update to PowerMill, Version 2019.1, Clinton says: “This was released in early September and we know that when you are driving an expensive 3 or 5-axis machine tool, one of the big risks is collisions, which we all naturally want to avoid. With the 2019.1 release of PowerMill, we’ve put some pretty cool technology in there to identify and manage collisions. Traditionally, if you were programming a toolpath in the PowerMill software (prior to this advancement), we gave users the opportunity to identify where collisions were occurring and how to remove them.”

“So, the toolpath would be calculated and any issues regarding the tool and toolholder would be removed. The problem with that is there would be a gap in the toolpath and there would still be stock that needs to be removed. The latest release changes the way the code works and instead of just removing collisions, they are highlighted in a different colour. This makes it easier to identify and take steps to resolve the issues. The dynamic control function in PowerMill allows us to tilt the machine or spindle to machine the part and avoid collision or alternately users can opt for using longer reach cutting tools.”

Automatic Tool Tilting 

Also added to the latest release of PowerMill 2019.1 is the Automatic Tool Tilting feature. Legacy users of PowerMill will realise that we’ve had Automatic Tool Tilting in PowerMill for some time. However, the previous version gave the user a host of different options on how and which way the machine would tilt to avoid collision. If you are an expert, that is great as it gives huge amounts of control. If you are a new user to 5-axis machining, there is likely to be some unease there. So, with the latest release, we have added an automatic option. This allows customers to literally select automatic and regardless of what tool you are using or the shape of the part you are machining, the machine will avoid the collision by tilting the axis away from the problem area. To do this, we have stabilised the movement of the C-axis of the machine tool.”