34 June 2024 Production Engineering Solutions pesmedia.com CAD/CAM Find out more at www.tebis.com Call 024 7615 8178 or email [email protected] ■ CNC Process Optimisation ■ CAM Automation ■ 6 Cloud Libraries If machines were to decide ... ... they’d love Tebis NC programs! Not all NC programs are created the same – optimise your NC machining process with Tebis Intelligent Manufacturing! In this Q&A, Dr Andy Cheadle, chief technology officer at CloudNC discusses the latest advances of its CAM Assist manufacturing software, designed to end the bottleneck created by manual CAM programming. Q) Can you give some general background about CloudNC and its motivation for developing CAM Assist? A) Precision manufacturing is fundamental to every aspect of modern life. Almost everything we use contains components that are made by machinists – which requires considerable time, effort and resources. And as we know within the industry, it’s not always carried out as efficiently as it could be. CloudNC’s mission is to unlock single-click machining for every precision factory in the world. Our technology completes much of the manual work involved with machining a component – whether that’s programming a machine, designing a fixture, creating a schedule to produce it, or selecting the correct tools, and feeds and speeds for the job. As a result, precision manufacturers we work with become much more productive. Experts spend less time on busy work, and instead add value by applying their knowledge to more complex tasks. Meanwhile, less-experienced machinists are guided by an advanced machining AI that gives them a higher starting point, enabling them to get up to speed more quickly. We’ve been developing solutions for those problems since 2015, and CAM Assist is our first software product to hit the market. It’s a plug-in for CAM software that generates professional machining strategies, cycle time estimates and fixture designs in seconds at the click of a button. We launched CAM Assist in June 2023 for 3-axis components, and it’s now being used by hundreds of machinists around the world. Now, we’ve upgraded the solution so it can now generate machining strategies for 3+2 axis components as well, greatly increasing the potential application for the software. Q) So, broadly speaking, how does it work? A) Previously, depending on complexity, it could take a CAM programmer between an hour to several days to determine the best strategy to CNC machine a new component. This includes selecting the correct tools, workholding and toolpath strategies, determining between hundreds of thousands of potential variables and approaches. CAM Assist is powered by computational geometry and hybridised AI physical modelling techniques that select the tools needed to manufacture a part, along with approach directions and appropriate speeds and feeds. As a result, a CAM Assist user can upload a 3D CAD model of a 3-axis or 3+2-axis part and the software determines the milling tools needed from those available and how they will be used. In minutes or seconds, depending on part complexity, CAM Assist drafts the strategy required to instruct a CNC machine how to make it, within the user’s existing CAM program. If you are a Fusion, Mastercam or Siemens NX user, you can download this technology today and be making parts with its help in minutes. How that actually works in practice is as follows: OOur AI understands (almost) every way in which a CNC machine could make all aspects of a component - every feature, every hole, every surface, etc OIt also understands the rules of machining, which enables the AI to decide which of those methods would generate the best results OTo generate the program of a new component, the AI processes all of the possible machining methods for every aspect of the component and decides which combination would create a machining strategy: one that makes the component efficiently OThis optimisation process may require billions of calculations, requiring both a lot of computing power as well as some extremely complex statistical machine learning algorithms (that are proprietary to CloudNC) Q) What are the advantages for companies and their production? A) Using CAM Assist means the amount of time it takes to go from CAD to component – a bottleneck in many factories due to a global skills shortage – is greatly reduced, compared to the previous manual programming process. That gain enables manufacturers to raise productivity and shorten lead-times while also quoting for more work, more quickly. We estimate that an average workshop using CAM Assist would save an average of over Dr Andy Cheadle, chief technology officer at CloudNC CAM Assist understands the rules of machining, which enables the AI to decide which machining strategies generate the best results CAM Assist now comes with 3+2 machining toolpath capability, greatly expanding the complexity of components and toolpath strategies required CloudNC has added the Cutting Parameters AI module to the software that can generate optimum speeds and feeds in moments AI advances for CAM programming
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