AN OPTIMIZATION APPROACH TO THE CONTOUR ERROR CONTROL OF CNC MACHINE-TOOLS USING GENETIC ALGORITHMS

A contour control strategy has been studied in this paper to improve t he contour error of CNC machine tools. First, a single axis controller is analysed and then a velocity feedforward controller is added in th e velocity loop. To further reduce the contour error, a cross-coupled controller is adopted and an algorithm for an on-line estimation of th e contour error in arbitrary curved contouring is proposed. These cont roller parameters are all optimised by an efficient robust optimisatio n technique using genetic algorithms. Experimental results are provide d to illustrate the proposed methods.