A Study on the NC Embedding of Vision System for Tool Breakage Detection

공구파손감지용 비젼시스템의 NC실장에 관한 연구

In this research, a vision system for detecting tool breakage which is hardly detected by such indirect in-process measurement method as acoustic emission, cutting torque and motor current was developed and embedded into a PC-NC system. The vision system consists of CMOS image sensors, a slit beam laser generator and an image grabber board. Slit beam laser was emitted on the tool surface to separate the tool geometry well from the various obstacles surrounding the tool. An image of tool is captured through two steps of signal processing, that is, median filtering and thresholding and then the tool is estimated normal or broken by use of change of the centroid of the captured image. An air curtain made by the jetting high-pressure air in front of the lens was devised to prevent the vision system from being contaminated by scattered coolant, cutting chips in cutting process. To embed the vision system to a Siemens PC-NC controller 840D NC, an HMI(Human Machine Interface) program was developed under the Windows 95 operating system of MMC103. The developed HMI is placed in a sub window of the main window of 840D and this program can be activated or deactivated either by a soft key on the operating panel or M codes in the NC part program. As the tool breakage is detected, the HMI program emit a command for automatic tool change or send alarm to the NC kernel. Evaluation test in a high speed tapping center showed the developed system was successful in detection of the small-radius tool breakage.