Hurco Companies, Inc.

Paul J Gray

Karl Szabo

Kishore Lankalapalli

Donald J Hammer

Jiang Lu

David G Coffman

Matthew H Tinkle

Jesse C Satterwhite

Steven S Gearhart

Scott A Albright

Ken E Maisonville

Tony L Koenigsknecht

Albert J Kohn

A system is provided for determining a loading location of a workpiece relative to a holding fixture, comprising: a robot including a sensor; and a controller coupled to the robot and configured to activate the robot to grip the workpiece; enable a free-drive mode to permit an operator to move the gripped workpiece to a starting location; execute a center location routine including causing the robot to: move in a first direction until the sensor senses contact with a first surface of the holding fixture; move in a second direction until the sensor senses contact with a second surface; move in a third direction until the sensor senses contact with a third surface; and compute a three-dimensional center point of the holding fixture representing the loading location of the workpiece using the first, second and third sensed positions of contact.

Method and system for determining a workplace loading location in a CNC machine with a robotic arm

An automated vise is disclosed. A gross moveable jaw drive has a stroke longer than the stroke of a fine moveable jaw drive. With this construction, the gross moveable jaw drive can be utilized to actuate the one or more moveable jaws of the vise over a distance greater than the fine moveable jaw drive stroke to a position in which actuation of the fine moveable jaw drive is capable of positioning the one or more moveable jaws in a clamp position to apply pressure to hold the workpiece for machining by, e.g., a CNC machine. In this way, the automated vise can account for workpieces of differing size.

Automated smart vise system

The present disclosure includes a method for use on a machine tool system having a controller, three linear axes of motion and at least one rotary axis, for determining the orientation of the rotary axis relative to the linear axes, including mounting a sphere to a system component that rotates about the rotary axis, rotating the component to move the sphere to at least three positions about the rotary axis, measuring a center of the sphere at each of the positions by using the controller to move a probe mounted to a spindle of the system into contact with the sphere, computing, using the controller, a plane fitting the center measurements, and computing, using the controller, a vector normal to the plane passing through a center of rotation of an arc lying in the plane and fitting the center measurements, the vector corresponding to the orientation of the rotary axis.

Method for measuring a rotary axis of a machine tool system

Systems and methods for virtual machine management are disclosed. A virtual machine manager may communicate with a storehouse, which may include one or more virtual machines. The virtual machine manager may select one or more virtual machines, or may create one or more virtual machines, depending on the requirements of an input.

Virtual machine manager

A method is disclosed for controlling movement of machine tool systems by providing a conversational programming interface that permits a user to create a universal program for execution by various machine tool systems for machining a part, each system having at least four movable axes. The user defines program blocks including geometry definitions which are independent of any axis kinematics configuration. A first tool path relative to a first Cartesian coordinate system is generated for forming the geometry, then mapped to a second Cartesian coordinate system corresponding to the part. The mapped path is transformed to a third Cartesian coordinate system corresponding to an orientation and location of the part relative to an axis kinematics configuration of a current machine tool system. The transformed path is processed to generate positions for the movable axes of the current system.

Universal conversational programming for machine tool systems

The present disclosure includes a machine tool system having multiple zones. The zones may be areas divided by physical barriers or virtual zones. The zones may include a first zone having a first kinematics arrangement and a second zone having a second kinematics arrangement. The first zone and the second zone may share one or more machine axis and at least one of the first zone and the second zone has at least one non-shared machine axis. The present disclosure also includes multi-interface machine tool systems.

Multi-zone machine tool system

The present disclosure includes a generalized kinematics library which may be used to control the motion of a machine tool system and to process data for other applications, such as simulation graphics. Methods are disclosed to interpolate the movement of various axes of a machine tool system through a machine singularity point.

Generalized kinematics system

A method and system are provided which reorders a sequence of operations of a part program to reduce the number of tool changes during execution of the program. The reordered sequence maintains a sequence of at least a first portion of the operations.

Method and apparatus for reducing tool change operations

The present disclosure includes a motion control system for a machine tool system configured to shape a part with a tool, including an I/O module with machine configuration information that defines limits of a three-dimensional working space of the machine tool system. The I/O module further includes a part program that specifies first and second positions of the tool without reference to the working space limits. The motion control system further includes a software controller configured to internally process moves to determine whether the tool can be repositioned from the first position to the second position while maintaining the tool above a minimum clearance from the part and within the working space limits, output the internally processed moves to the machine tool system to cause movement of the tool if the tool can be safely repositioned, and output an error if the tool cannot be safely repositioned.

Growing community of inventors

Zionsville, IN, United States of America

Paul J Gray