Grant: Engage Grants Program

The industrial partner of the current proposal, Lamko Tool & Mold Inc., represents one of the Southwestern Ontario's market leaders in the area of automotive mold manufacturing. Lamko was founded in 1978 at its current location in London, Ontario, and managed to steadily grow its customer base which now includes large OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers from auto industry. However, in order to thrive on a highly dynamic and global economy, the company is currently interested into automation of some of the machining setup procedures, which were traditionally performed manually, in an error-prone and cost inefficient manner. A good example in this regard is represented by the accurate acquisition of the geometric features of the cutter/tool holder assembly, which is essential for generation of precise and collision-free machining instructions by means of computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software. Pre-cutting CAM-based machining simulations ensure final product accuracy and eliminate the risk of collision between various components of tooling, machine tool and workpiece, with undesirable consequences on the part quality and/or operator safety. The company has currently in use more than 300 different tool holders, each to support a broad palette of cutting tools. To address this concern, the present application will be focused on the development of a non-contact and automated system capable to measure and then reproduce the geometry of the tool holders used on computer numerically-controlled (CNC) milling machine tools. As a suitable solution to this problem, an automated vision-based system will be developed to accurately acquire the geometry in a digital imaging format to be further processed to a geometric input that is acceptable to the CAM system. In addition to the foreseeable socio-economic benefits to Lamko, the project is expected to open up new R&D investigation avenues.