Computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools are widely used in various industrial fields ranging from aerospace, automotive, ship building, and the die/mould to manufacture products. However, tool paths of most CNC machine tools are composed of a series of linear motion commands (G01), which will inevitably cause the discontinuity in curvature and feedrate at the junctions between adjacent linear tool path segments, deteriorating the surface quality with unfavorable marks and decreasing the machining efficiency. To solve this problem for obtaining the steady and continuous motions of machine tools, the local corners have to be smoothed. Generally, the existing corner smoothing methods can be classified as the global smoothing and the local corner smoothing, where the specially designed transition curves or the directly planned motion of machine tools are adopted to generate the geometrically corner-free tool path. Moreover, some new methods that focus on developing different transition or rounding strategies are also developed for further improving the kinematics performance of machine tools. In this paper, the recent advances and researches on corner smoothing methods are reviewed from different categories, and the conclusions, remaining challenges and future directions in corner smoothing are also presented.

Carbon fiber-reinforcement plastics (CFRP) have been widely applied in modern aerospace industry with aluminum alloy in the form of thin-walled stacks due to their superior mechanical and physical properties. However, for CFRP, the heat accumulation occurs easily during countersinking process in consequence of low thermal conductivity. The surface thermal damage of CFRP caused by excessive heat would affect the fatigue and stealth performance of aircraft. Consequently, the countersinking temperature is an important indicator to judge the feasibility of CFRP countersinking process. In this paper, to investigate temperature of countersinking process, the application of rotary ultrasonic machining technology to CFRP/Al thin-walled stacks countersinking process under different stiffness conditions with drilling-countersinking integrated tool is carried out by FEA (Finite element analysis) and experiments. And the influences of cutting temperature on countersunk wall quality are discussed. The results demonstrate that the maximum countersinking temperature increases with the decrease of axial stiffness, and the ultrasonic vibration can effectively reduce maximum countersinking temperature by 22.9%-26.2%. Furthermore, analysis of the surface quality of countersunk wall shows that the countersunk wall roughness and defects gradually deteriorate with the increase of the maximum countersinking temperature. Meanwhile, the ultrasonic vibration can improve countersunk surface quality by reducing maximum countersinking temperature effectively.