Monitoring of Long-term Changes in Geometric Errors of a Five-axis Machine Tool by Self-calibration for Touch-trigger Probe Measurement   Shota Onishi, Soichi Ibaraki, Masashi Yamaguchi, Takao Sugimoto       Abstract   Although a machine tool can be used for more than ten years under insufficiently air-conditioned environment, its accuracy is seldom inspected after it is installed in a machine tool user’s factory. Many machine tool builders commercialized a system to automatically measure the position and orientation errors of rotary axis average lines, which are often dominant error sources in the five-axis kinematic, and then to compensate for them, by using a touch-trigger probe. A critical issue with these methods is that they are not able to separate linear axis geometric errors from rotary axis geometric errors in principle. This paper proposes a self-calibration method for identifying geometric errors of both linear and rotary axes using a touch-trigger probe. The experimental results show long-term changes in the linear and rotary axis geometric errors, which are mainly due to the change in the thermal environment.   Keywords: Geometric error, Five-axis machine tool, Touch-trigger probe, Self-calibration, Error separation         >> Back to Home