The invention discloses a method for calculating the
radius of a cylindrical ball-end cutter for rough milling of a complex channel, and the method comprises the steps: generating a cutter center drive surface SB, 1; the method comprises the following steps: offsetting a cutter center driving surface SB, 1 to obtain a cutter center driving surface SB, 2, and discretizing the SB, 2 to obtain a plurality of straight
generatrix lines; taking any point on any straight
generatrix as a sphere center, and calculating a parameter interval in which the sphere center passes through the current straight
generatrix and is internally tangent to the
radius of an internally tangent sphere of S1 and S2; obtaining an iterative equation of the sphere center; the SB, 2 is biased with the minimum value of the
radius parameter set of the SB, 2 as the
offset distance to obtain the cutter center driving faces SB, 3, and the steps 2-5 are repeated till the radius parameter set of all the cutter center driving faces SB, k in the
machining area is obtained through calculation; in each
machining area, the minimum value in the corresponding radius parameter set serves as the radius of the cylindrical ball-end cutter in the
machining area; according to the method, the maximum radius of the cylindrical ball-end cutter for multi-axis point milling rough machining of the complex channel parts can be solved while interference of the cutter is avoided.