Optimal velocity trajectory generation for spray painting robot in offline mode

Abstract

In this paper a new automated offline robot trajectory generation approach for free form surfaces is developed. The spray gun trajectory is generated from the computer aided design (CAD) model of a surface depending on the process parameters and spray gun characteristics for a structured environment. A 'section' based approach is developed where paint passes consisting of points and normals are generated from different overlapping 'sections'. The paint thickness deviation is minimized by computing an optimal spray gun velocity per paint pass. Using the pass specific paint thickness function, a global optimization problem is formulated which results into optimal velocity values for all paint passes simultaneously. The approach was implemented on test surfaces and the simulation and experimental results reveal that the approach is flexible and efficient in generating trajectories for arbitrary free form surfaces.