components A bold vision
components A bold vision for the manufacturing industry written by Dr. Yavuz Murtezaoglu founder & managing director – ModuleWorks GmbH In this article I would like to share my insights with you on a very current topic which excites me a lot, since it is about the near future for all of us, and how things can improve greatly in CNC machining. From automotive safety to CNC machining First of all I would like to share a statement from Volvo, a car maker known for putting great focus on safety. They have been building very strong and safe cars, and people feel safe driving a Volvo car. They made the following statement and shared this publicly: “Volvo has set a bold vision that no Volvo car should be involved in a fatal or serious injury crash by 2030.” Now imagine transferring this bold vision to CNC machining and consider eliminating all CNC machine crashes by 2030. For an engineer such a vision is both very exciting and challenging, since there are so many things to be solved to get there. Is this vision achievable by 2030? Let’s take a look: Our journey with collision avoidance system (CAS) The journey started ten years ago with a machine tool builder in Europe building high-end 5-axis CNC machines asking us to provide real-time simulation capable of identifying collisions and stopping the machine to avoid machine crashes. With great support and collaboration of the CNC control ma nu facturer, we were able to get around 1-second of future data of the machine position. This allowed us to calculate all the moving parts of the machine and the removed material of the workpiece and decide in this time buffer very reliably if there is a collision ahead or not. We called this CAS standing for Collision Avoidance System. When we entered this undertaking, we knew at that time that our simulation engine was fast and powerful enough to detect collisions in real time with this 1-s look-ahead since one of the largest machine tool vendors in the world developed their collision avoidance solution based on our techno logy. But only after we started to work directly on the machine sitting on an Industrial PC as the CAS algorithm getting signals from CNC and PLC of the machine, we realized the scope of the problem: Dr. Yavuz Murtezaoglu, founder & managing director – ModuleWorks GmbH Understanding the true nature of CNC machines The state-of-the-art CNC machine is like playing an LP, but not knowing what it is playing: a turntable would strictly follow what is on the LP, not knowing if it is jazz or pop music. If there is a defect on the LP it might play the same track forever. Fortunately a turntable will not crash due to the LP being wrong. But the turntable does not know “the context” of what it is doing. Similarly a CNC machine gets an NC program and runs this program strictly without knowing what the NC program is going to do. Basically a CNC machine MUST trust the user that it is being fed with a good NC program either written on the machine control manually or generated by a CAM system. Most CNC machines have a tool table which numbers all the tools and puts some basic data like radius and length of the tools for doing so-called tool radius and tool length compensation for the purpose of dealing with tool wear and adjusting the motion accordingly. A simulation system running on an IPC with real-time and look-ahead access to CNC control is able to create from the NC program all the positions and orientations of the moving machine parts like table, spindle etc. and also update the inprocess workpiece during machining which is very important to distinguish between real collisions and false collisions in case the current removed material is not properly used in the calculation (picture left hand). The state-of-the-art CNC machine is like playing an LP, but not knowing what it is playing Overcoming engineering challenges After several man-years of effort of our people, the machine tool vendor and control maker, we were able to resolve all the several hundred detail problems to achieve the expected result: we were able to avoid collisions safely, both in manual mode and automatic mode, and we did not have any false collisions. What does this mean? The quality of a collision 50 no. 3, September 2025
components MDES infographic avoidance system is based on two important factors: it should never miss a real collision meaning that the machine should never crash. But at the same time, it should never create a false collision alarm and stop the machine, since during CNC machining an abrupt stop of machining would create marks on the workpiece and also lower the productivity. The operator might turn off the collision checking system if false collisions happen. As an engineer I can list you many cases that could have resulted in missed collisions or false collisions, but we were able to resolve all these issues one by one. What we did there has been a Hercules job, and it deserves a book by itself to be written. An engineering saying is: “once you resolve the biggest bottleneck and problem, you end up finding further bottlenecks, which were not so visible at the beginning.” An engineer is a restless person to iterate until all bottlenecks are resolved. Solving the job setup challenge This is exactly what happened to us: the CAS was working reliably but it required the tool and holder geometries, and the clamping shape to be entered exactly to operate CAS since, as I explained above, a CNC machine is like a turntable, not knowing what it is going to play next. This means even if the next job with its NC program is known to the machine, it did not have any clue about what we called “job setup”. This is the sum of all the geometries of tool, tool holders, workholding etc. which is always specific for each job. The machine geometry never changes, but each job requires a different setup. We provided a user interface for machine operators to enter the job setup data interactively and also allowed the import of job setup through a data format since most CAM systems have such data already, since they are used to setting up both the job and the tool path by the CAM programmer. This job setup data format has evolved to become the MDES format which stands for Manufacturing Data Exchange Specification which is today supported by many CAM vendors, machine tool vendors and control makers. We ended up creating a well-documented and free license format to be shared by the whole industry to get the backing of all players of the manufacturing space. Why did we do this? Creating an industry standard At the beginning of the article, I converted Volvo’s vision as a car maker to the vision of our industry to eliminate machine crashes by 2030. With CAS systems installed on all CNC machines and MDES data coming from all CAM systems, we have a realistic chance to achieve that. Although ModuleWorks is established very well in the industry, there might be other companies providing similar CAS solutions using their own technology and they can also freely use this format on a free and open license basis. Integrating a full CAS system to a CNC machine and control might be a big step for some providers and as an intermediate step some of them have an offline simulation (not real time) on the CNC control which allows to prove the NC program before starting the machining. Even this use case is supported by MDES format since an offline simulation also needs the job setup definition which is inside MDES. EMO 2025, hall 6, booth B55 further information: www.moduleworks.com no. 3, September 2025 51
