Tool path planning based on conformal parameterization for meshes

The similarity property of conformal parameterization makes it able to locally preserve the shapes between a surface and its parameter domain, as opposed to common parameterization methods. A parametric tool path planning method is proposed in this paper through such parameterization of triangular meshes which is furthermore based on the geodesic on meshes. The parameterization has the properties of local similarity and free boundary which are exploited to simplify the formulas for computing path parameters, which play a fundamentally important role in tool path planning, and keep the path boundary-conformed and smooth. Experimental results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, as well as the error analysis.