Feasibility Study of On-Machine Inspection of Micro Milling Cutter Runout

During the process of micro machining, the existence of tool runout not only aggravates the wear and breakage of the cutter, but also seriously affects the surface quality of the parts. In order to observe the runout of micro-milling cutter, a detection method based on machine vision was proposed in this paper, which can calculate the tool runout by measuring the maximum value of external fluctuation of the cutter assembly near the tool tip. The proposed method can realize the direct measurement of radial runout of a micro-milling cutter. A dedicated prototype measuring system was established, which includes an on-machine measurement unit, a controller and the software. To obtain the images of maximum profile of the cutter at different angles, the cutter should be perpendicular with the optical axis of camera lens in the on-machine measurement unit. The experiments verified that the proposed method is feasible and the developed measurement system can fulfill the needs of industrial applications.