Fast and templatable path planning of spray painting robots for regular surfaces

In this paper a fast and templatable planning framework is proposed to solve the automatic spray trajectory generating problem on typical regular surfaces including planes, cylindrical surfaces, conical surfaces and spherical surfaces. The elliptical double-beta static coating growth rate model is selected as a reference model, and the corresponding static models for regular surfaces are established according to the principle of constant paint flux. On this basis, a unified dynamic multi-stroke coat deposition optimization model on regular surfaces is created with the objective of coating thickness uniformity. The optimal key path parameters, i.e., spraying gun velocity and stroke distance, can be calculated so that the trajectories are automatically generated on regular surfaces using cutting-projection processing. In addition, the proposed method is extended to a common approach for complex free surface with large curvature using hierarchical segmentation criterion, where the complex surface is segmented to a number of regular surfaces and each regular surface is planned by template programming. Visual simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed algorithm.