At precut fabrication sites for high-mix low-volume production, multi-axis machines are operated using a dedicated CAD/CAM that derives an operating path concurrently with detailed modeling. Because a CAD/CAM based workflow has complicated frontloading and data management issues, the authors developed a generic CAM that creates an operation path from a 3D geometry of a part. This paper reports a process path deriving method for a circular saw using 3D shape recognition based on PointNet. The proposed method classifies shape types and segments cut patterns for joints of parts represented as a point cloud. A validation experiment showed the joints are classified and segmented properly.
