In this Q&A article, Dr Andy Cheadle, chief technology officer at CloudNC discusses with Ed Hill the latest advances of its CAM Assist manufacturing software, designed to end the bottleneck created by manual CAM programming.

CloudNC says its mission is to unlock single-click machining for every precision factory in the world. Its CAM Assist software completes much of the manual work involved with machining a component - whether that’s programming a machine, designing a fixture, creating a schedule to produce it, or selecting the correct tools and feeds and speeds for the job.  

As a result, precision manufacturers can become much more productive. Experts spend less time on busy work, and instead add value by applying their knowledge to more complex tasks. Additionally, less-experienced machinists are guided by an advanced machining AI that gets them up to speed more quickly. 

In development since 2015, CAM Assist is CloudNC’s first software product to hit the market as a plug-in for other existing CAM software that generates professional machining strategies, cycle time estimates and fixture designs in seconds. Launched originally only for 3-axis components, now it has been upgraded so it can generate machining strategies for 3+2 axis components - greatly increasing the potential application for the software. 

Q) Broadly, how does CAM Assist work for users?

Previously, it could take a CAM programmer between an hour to several days to determine the best strategy to CNC machine a new component. This includes selecting the correct tools, workholding and toolpath strategies - determining between hundreds of thousands of potential variables and approaches. 

CAM Assist is powered by computational geometry and hybridised AI physical modelling techniques that select the tools needed to manufacture a part, along with approach directions and appropriate speeds and feeds. 

As a result, a CAM Assist user can upload a CAD 3D model of a 3-axis or 3+2 axis part and the software determines the milling tools needed from those available and how they will be used, and in minutes or seconds, depending on part complexity, CAM Assist drafts the strategy required to instruct a CNC machine how to make it, within the user’s existing CAM program. If you are a Fusion, Mastercam or Siemens NX user, you can download this technology today and be making parts within minutes. 

How that actually works in practice is as follows: 1) Our AI understands (almost) every way in which a CNC machine could make all aspects of a component - every feature, every hole, every surface, etc. 2) It also understands the rules of machining, which enables the AI to decide which of those methods would generate the best results. 3) To generate the program of a new component, the AI processes all of the possible machining methods for every aspect of the component and decides which combination would create a machining strategy: one that makes the component efficiently. 4) This optimisation process may require billions of calculations, requiring both a lot of computing power, as well as some extremely complex statistical machine learning algorithms (that are proprietary to CloudNC).

Q) What are the advantages for companies and their production?

Using CAM Assist means the amount of time it takes to go from CAD to component - a bottleneck in many factories, due to a global skills shortage - is greatly reduced, compared to the previous manual programming process. 

That gain enables manufacturers to raise productivity and shorten lead times, while also quoting for more work, more quickly. We estimate that an average workshop using CAM Assist would save an average of over 300 hours of programming and estimating time a year. 

In addition, the software frees up time for experienced programmers, while also allowing junior employees to program more complex parts and be productive in 3+2 axis faster, helping fill the manufacturing’s widening skills gap.

Q) You have recently developed 3+2 machining strategies for CAM Assist. How does this improve the software’s capabilities? It substantially expands the type and complexity of the components that CAM Assist can program toolpath strategies for, greatly increasing the application of the software to more difficult and time-consuming tasks (from approximately 20% of the market to around two-thirds of it) and enabling many more manufacturers to benefit from its advantages. It also means that CAM Assist can, for the first time, be applied to all but the most complex precision components that manufacturers usually require.  

Allowing the CNC machine to rotate the part gives manufacturers far greater flexibility in how they manufacture components, while also accelerating cycle times. However, 3+2 axis is also harder to program, so the skillset is more difficult to find and retain. 

From a coding perspective, introducing these extra elements adds more potential ways of making every feature of every component (by several orders of magnitude), meaning the calculations for the AI to create a manufacturing strategy become far more complex. 

How did we solve this? By sheer hard work and persistence. The problem is so hard that the algorithms that achieve one milestone don’t necessarily translate into the next level of complexity, so we have had to throw away solutions and come up with new and more complex ones that do. 

Q) How does CAM Assist benefit aerospace part production particularly?

Today, flight-critical aerospace parts are often precision manufactured out of aluminium or titanium and produced on a CNC machine. Given the cost of the materials involved and the high complexity of the components created, programming errors or inefficiencies result in expensive mistakes, pushing up manufacturing costs and delaying delivery to market.

In effect, the efficiency gains offered by CAM Assist are therefore magnified when applied to aerospace part development, because the costs involved (and the implications of wasted time) are so much greater, as are the lead-times. 

Q) How can it help with the current need to transform aerospace power sources away from fossil fuels and towards net zero?

If we need to transform how aircraft are powered, we will need to redesign large elements of their construction and manufacture. Where once an aircraft needed a tank for aviation fuel, now it may require a hydrogen tank, or even a battery or solar panel housing. That means the design of those elements must change, as will everything that connects those elements to the rest of the aircraft.

This is where CAD/CAM comes in, as the design-make-test-iterate loop for creating all those components is extremely slow in machining – and that’s what our software accelerates. Essentially, we can remove the bottleneck around part design and iteration and make sure new components and parts enter production far quicker than might otherwise have been possible. Equally, automating these processes effectively reduces scrap, improves cycle times and reduces the resources consumed to manufacture the part – benefiting us all.

 Q) Finally, in what other ways has CAM Assist developed recently? 

There are many ways of further developing CAM Assist to make it even more useful for users - such as by using our AI to assist with estimating, fixtures, or feeds and speeds for every facet of a component. We’ve now introduced Cutting Parameters AI as a new module for CAM Assist that automatically generates appropriate physics-based feeds and speeds for virtually any CNC machining scenario, in moments. It allows users to instantly set unique feeds and speeds for every toolpath in a CAM program, even for materials and tools they’ve never used before. We expect this will give users a 20% productivity gain when machining.

CloudNC will be exhibiting at the Farnborough Airshow in hall 4, stand 1520.

 www.cloudnc.com