Designing NURBS Cam Profiles Using Trigonometric Splines

We show how to design cam profiles using NURBS curves whose support functions are appropriately scaled trigonometric splines. In particular, we discuss the design of cams with various side conditions of practical interest, such as interpolation conditions, constant diameter, minimal acceleration or jerk, and constant dwells. In contrast to general polynomial curves, these NURBS curves have the useful property that their offsets are of the same type, and hence also have an exact NURBS representation.