Abstract: Triangular mesh surface gains wide applications in industrial field. However, the tool path generation methods for polyhedral machining are very limited and the isoplanar method is still the common used method. A conformal map based isoparametric method for kinematic path generation is proposed. Through establishing the parametric relations between the triangular meshes embedded in the 3D space and the rectangular or circular region on the 2D plane, zigzag or contour paths are finally implemented by inversely mapping the planar iso-parametric paths into the physical space. Also, the issues of CC point and side interval calculation as well as interference detection are discussed in detail. The results show that the pro-posed method is boundary-conformed and can improve ma-chining dynamics and efficiency in most cases.

Key words: Accessibility analysis, Conformal map Tool path planning, Triangular mesh