Application of robot offline programming in thermal spraying

Nowadays, robot manipulators have already been widely used in thermal spraying. They can be programmed in two ways: online and offline programming. The first programming method is easy to operate but difficult to guarantee the quality of coatings, especially for some complex workpieces. The offline programming technology is a good solution that can overcome the online programming tolerances by using the CAD files of the workpiece. rpose of this study is to introduce the current applications of offline programming technology in thermal spraying, including some popular methods of path generation, process simulation, robot kinematics optimization, etc. In the last part of this paper, two examples of offline programming in thermal spraying were presented which refer to the trajectory optimization on a workpiece with a great angle and path generation on the complex workpiece with external axis. The simulations and experiments have proved that offline programming can effectively improve the production efficiency and coating quality.