Research on the post-processing method for CNC program oriented to miniature five-axis machining system

In this paper, an approach of converting the APT file generated by the CAM software to the CNC machining program, executed by the CNC system based on the UMAC control platform for the self-developed 5-axis micro-milling system, is presented. The transformation of the cutter location coordinate between workpiece coordinate system and machine coordinate system during processing is obtained by analyzing the motion topological structure of the micro-milling system. And the flow of writing the CNC program is also proposed according to the features of the CNC system. Then, the conversion of APT file to UMAC file is established and the auto-generation of the CNC milling program is realized through using the text processing functions in Matlab and the display of the tool-path is also realized by Matlab's functions.