DESIGNING NURBS CAM PROFILES USING TRIGONOMETRIC SPLINES

We show how to design cam profiles using NURBS curves whose support fu nctions are appropriately scaled trigonometric splines. In particular, we discuss the design of cams with various side conditions of practic al interest, such as interpolation conditions, constant diameter, mini mal acceleration or jerk, and constant dwells. In contrast to general polynomial curves, these NURBS curves have the useful property that th eir offsets are of the same type, and hence also have an exact NURBS r epresentation.