Testing of the delay time of wireless communication of CNC machine tools’ probes and controller

Abstract

Touch-trigger probes for CNC milling machines usually use wireless communication in the radio or IR band. Additionally they enable triggering signal filtering in order to avoid false triggers of the probe. These solutions cause a delay in trigger signal transmission from the probe to the machine tool controller. This delay creates an additional pre-travel component, which is directly proportional to the measurement speed and which is the cause of a previously observed but not explained increase of the pre-travel with the increase of the measurement speed. In the paper, a method of testing the delay time of triggering signal is described, an example of delay time testing results is presented and the previous, unexplained results of other researchers are analysed in terms of signal transmission delay.