A novel method for laser high-speed cutting of curved glass under hybrid constraints of machining efficiency and surface accuracy

Five-axis laser machine tools need to deliver the laser beam through a fixed optical path. Consequently, they typically adopt a specific configuration: a four-axis motion platform for workpiece pose adjustment, and a vertical axis for laser focus control. The four-axis motion platform consists of two linear axes and two rotary tables in series. Subjected to the static and dynamic influences of the other three axes, its underlying linear axis suffers from poor dynamic performance. This limitation restricts the machining speed, resulting in low efficiency in curved glass cutting. To address this issue, this paper reconstructs the kinematic structure of the machine tool by replacing low-speed linear motion with high-speed rotational motion, thereby eliminating the constraint imposed by the low-dynamic axis on machining speed, and proposes the RMRLM (Rotational Motion Replacement for Linear Motion) planning method. On this basis, to compensate for the contour error and incident angle error induced by the RMRLM method, the ORMRLM (Optimized Rotational Motion Replacement for Linear Motion) planning method is proposed, which integrates interpolation optimization and segmentation optimization algorithms to target these two types of errors. Experimental results demonstrate that when the maximum Y-axis machining speed is reduced from 600 mm/min to 60 mm/min, the machining time of the conventional method increases from 57.1 s to 273.9 s, while the machining time of both the RMRLM and ORMRLM methods remains stable at approximately 51 s, achieving an 81% improvement in machining efficiency. Additionally, the ORMRLM method further reduces the linear segment machining error induced by the RMRLM method by 22.4%.