CAD-Based Path Planning

Abstract: Spray painting is an important processes in the manufacture of many durable products, such as automobiles, furniture and appliances. The uniformity of paint thickness on a product can strongly influence the quality of the product. Paint gun trajectory planning is critical to achieve the uniformity of paint thickness and has been an active research area for many years. Typical teaching method is tedious, time-consuming, and the paint thickness is dependent on the operator's skill. Automatic CAD-guided spray gun trajectory generation for spray painting is highly desirable for today's automotive manufacturing. Generating paint gun trajectories for free-form surfaces to satisfy paint thickness requirements is still highly challenging due to the complex geometry of free-form surfaces. A new method has been developed to generate the spray gun trajectory for free-form surfaces such that the paint thickness is optimized. This trajectory generation method can also be applied to many other CAD-guided robot trajectory planning applications, such as spray coating and spray forming.

Researchers: Heping Cheng, Weihua Sheng

        Publication:

H.Chen, W.Sheng, N.Xi, M.Song, Y.Chen, "CAD-Guided Uniformity Guaranteed Robot Trajectory Planning for Spray Painting of Free Form Surfaces ", M2VIP 2001, HongKong.

H.Chen, W.Sheng, N.Xi, M.Song, Y.Chen, " Automated Robot Trajectory Planning for Spray Painting of Free-Form Surfaces in Automotive Manufacturing ", Submitted to ICRA 2002.