Research work in high speed machining is limited by the closed industrial CNCs. An Open CNC would make further optimization of the machining process possible by controlling accurately the commands sent to the machine tool drives. A key role of the CNC is to perform the feedrate interpolation which consists in generating the setpoints sent to each axis of a machine tool based on a NC program.

In high speed machining, the feedrate is limited by the velocity, acceleration and jerk of each axis of the machine tool. The VPOp (Velocity Profile Optimization) algorithm aims at finding an optimized feedrate profile which makes best use of the kinematical characteristics of the machine. This is achieved by intersecting all the constraints given by the drives in an iterative algorithm.

It is worth noting that each axis jerk is limited and not only the tangential jerk. The proposed VPOp method is general and can be applied to any articulated mechanical structure as it is demonstrated in the given examples. Moreover the algorithm has been tested in G1 and NURBS 3-axis machining and in 5-axis milling with a robot arm. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated thanks to a comparison with an industrial CNC and can be tested using the VPOp software.