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Drilling and milling operations are material removal processes involved in everyday conventional productions, especially in the high-speed metal cutting industry. The monitoring of tool information (wear, dynamic behavior, deformation, etc.) is essential to guarantee the success of product fabrication. Many methods have been applied to monitor the cutting tools from the information of cutting force, spindle motor current, vibration, as well as sound acoustic emission. However, those methods are indirect and sensitive to environmental noises. Here, the in-process imaging technique that can capture the cutting tool information while cutting the metal was studied. As machinists judge whether a tool is worn-out by the naked eye, utilizing the vision system can directly present the performance of the machine tools. We proposed a phase shifted strobo-stereoscopic method (Figure 1) for three-dimensional (3D) imaging. The stroboscopic instrument is usually applied for the measurement of fast-moving objects. The operation principle is as follows: when synchronizing the frequency of the light source illumination and the motion of object, the object appears to be stationary. The motion frequency of the target is transferring from the count information of the encoder signals from the working rotary spindle. If small differences are added to the frequency, the object appears to be slowly moving or rotating. This effect can be working as the source for the phase-shifting; with this phase information, the target can be whole-view 3D reconstructed by 360 degrees. The stereoscopic technique is embedded with two CCD cameras capturing images that are located bilateral symmetrically in regard to the target. The 3D scene is reconstructed by the location information of the same object points from both the left and right images. In the proposed system, an air spindle was used to secure the motion accuracy and drilling/milling speed. As shown in Figure 2, two CCDs with 10X objective lenses were installed on a linear rail with rotary stages to capture the machine tool bit raw picture for further 3D reconstruction. The overall measurement process was summarized in the flow chart (Figure 3). As the count number of encoder signals is related to the rotary speed, the input speed (unit of RPM) was set as the reference signal to control the frequency (f0) of the illumination of the LED. When the frequency was matched with the reference signal, both CCDs started to gather the pictures. With the mismatched frequency (Δf) information, a sequence of images was gathered under the phase-shifted process for a whole-view 3D reconstruction. The study in this paper was based on a 3/8’’ drilling tool performance monitoring. This paper presents the principle of the phase-shifted strobe-stereoscopic 3D imaging process. A hardware set-up is introduced, , as well as the 3D imaging algorithm. The reconstructed image analysis under different working speeds is discussed, the reconstruction resolution included. The uncertainty of the imaging process and the built-up system are also analyzed. As the input signal is the working speed, no other information from other sources is required. This proposed method can be applied as an on-machine or even in-process metrology. With the direct method of the 3D imaging machine vision system, it can directly offer the machine tool surface and fatigue information. This presented method can supplement the blank for determining the performance status of the machine tools, which further guarantees the fabrication process.
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