Freesteel Blog » Rolling the wrong way on the linking motions

Rolling the wrong way on the linking motions

Thursday, June 26th, 2014 at 4:52 pm Written by:

Just some notes on the serious work that’s still going on. This whole thing was supposed to take a couple of months. It’s run 6 months beyond the time I expected it to already because I had no idea how hard it would be. But this shouldn’t matter in the long-run as the code will probably be in service for 60 years if it works.

At the moment Adaptive Clearing doesn’t do any fancy links. If it can’t go nearly directly through the partially cleared pocket, it rolls off and does a retract to a roll-on to the next starting point. This doesn’t look great. Also, when we re-order the passes for better efficiency, we shred all the links that are any good and need another way of recreating them.

I’ve been meaning to write up something about how we re-order the passes for a year, because it’s a really simple trick. It’s unfortunate that it exposes this re-linking problem, so you don’t get the benefit.

I’ve disabled all the smoothing features that were getting in the way. The first priority is to make a path from the start to the end that avoids the uncut stock using the A-star algorithm which operates within the model of the area. This is how it currently looks:
engagementfulllink

We’re going to get lots of questions about how it passes on the “wrong” side of the previously cut path. The diagram below should explain why it is correct.
engagementcutwrong

The real problem is that my linking path is going round the wrong side of the roll-off arc. It then has to back-track to find its way to its linking destination. Note how it zig-zags through the cells because re-smoothing is disabled.
engagementlinksarc

The problem is that the cutting cycle skips out sections when there is almost nothing left to cut. But my re-linking motions spots this material and tries to avoid it. Since there’s not enough room to get round the arc on one side, it goes round the wrong way.
engagementlinks

This small diagram shows how there is a lot less material there than it seems.
engagementcutshort

But still, it’s non-zero, and I don’t want to include a tolerance here. So I’m going to try and barge through the start of the linking motion and splice it in some way. Not sure how to code it yet. Things keep growing more and more layers of unexpected complexity. That’s how it goes.

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