A universal optimal approach to cam curve design and its applications

This paper proposes a universal optimal approach to cam curve design. The approach consists of four issues that include a cam curve description using uniform B-splines, an objective function in a universal weighting form to integrate the design requirements, an automatic adjusting technique for weighting coefficient values and an improved Complex Search Algorithm to optimize the control points of B-splines. With the approach, it is possible to deal simultaneously with multiple objectives for either kinematical or dynamic optimization. Application examples on the kinematical and dynamical optimization of cam curves are presented together with detailed discussions. These examples, especial the dynamic optimization to control the residual vibration for a cam curve used in an indexing cam mechanism, sufficiently illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.