The invention discloses a free-form surface three-axis ball-end cutter equal
approximation error finish
machining tool path generation method which comprises the following steps: firstly, importing a free-form surface model to be machined, and setting data such as the
radius, the line spacing, the
approximation error maximum allowable value and the precision of a ball-end cutter; secondly, a group of section planes are planned according to the row spacing to intersect with the curved surface, the intersecting line serves as a cutter contact curve, and an equal-bow-height-error cutter contact
iterative search method for driving cutter contact adjustment through the
geometric distance is provided for the cutter contact curve on the section planes; the maximum distance between a cutter
cutting envelope surface and a cutter contact track line is used as an
approximation error, and an adaptive discrete method is adopted to carry out approximation error calculation; and finally, the
cutter location points of the equal-bow-height-error cutter contact points serve as initial values, an equal-error
cutter location point calculation method of step length self-adaptive adjustment iteration is provided, approximation errors between the
cutter location points are all within an allowable range, and therefore the free-form surface three-axis ball-end cutter equal approximation error finish
machining cutter path is obtained.