Patent ID: 6952627

Claim:
A method of machining a surface of a workpiece, the method comprising: bringing a cutting tool into contact with the surface of the workpiece; and for at least one cutting pass, i, causing relative movement between the cutting tool and the surface of the workpiece along a path in the surface of the workpiece; wherein the path is determined by processing a mathematical function defined over a segment, C, of a coordinate system and characterized by a set of nonrandom, random or pseudorandom parameters selected from the group consisting of amplitude, phase and frequency; wherein causing relative movement between the cutting tool and the surface of the workpiece includes: bandpass filtering a noise signal; providing the bandpass filtered noise signal to a function generator; generating a randomly modulated mathematical function from the function generator; in response to the randomly modulated function, directing the relative movement between the cutting tool and the surface of the workpiece along the path in the surface of the workpiece.