Automated industrial robot path planning for spray painting process: A review

Industrial robots are widely used to paint final products in many industries, such as automotive and furniture etc. Robot path planning based on the CAD models of parts for spray painting is critical for product quality, process cycle time and material waste etc. Currently automated robot path planning has always caused a bottleneck for the spray painting processes because typical manual teaching methods are time consuming, error-prone and skill dependent. Thus, it is essential to develop automated tool path planning methods to replace manual tool path planning ones in order to reduce the cost and improve product quality. This challenging research topic has been receiving more and more attention from both academia and industry. Therefore, a review of automated tool path planning methods is necessary to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the current techniques.