Flexible Robotic Drawing on 3D Objects with an Industrial Robot

Abstract

Robotic path planning is a crucial step in in-dustrial manufacturing processes on 3D objects. The industry trend of growing product diversity and individual customization requires fully automatic and flexible production systems. In this work, an automatic workflow to execute a drawing process on a 3D object from a user-provided 2D input pattern is presented. The workflow involves a mesh segmentation, a flattening algorithm using least-squares conformal mappings and a projection using barycentric coordinates. Based on the resulting 3D path, a robot trajectory is automatically generated. Two different control concepts, i.e. motion control and hybrid force/motion control, are evaluated experimentally in view of replication accuracy and contact forces.