Development of deposition models for paint application on surfaces embedded in R3 for use in automated path planning

As part of an ongoing collaborative effort with the Ford Motor Company, our research aims to develop practical and efficient trajectory planning tools for automotive painting. This paper documents our efforts to develop analytic deposition models for electrostatic rotating bell (ESRB) atomizers, which have recently become widely used in the automotive painting industry. Conventional deposition models, used in earlier automatic trajectory planning tools, fail to capture the complexity of deposition patterns generated by ESRB atomizers. The models presented here take into account both the surface curvature and the deposition pattern of ESRB atomizers, enabling planning tools to optimize trajectories to meet several measures of quality, such as coating uniformity. In addition to the development of our models, we present experimental results used to evaluate our models, and verify the interaction between the deposition pattern, trajectory, and surface curvature.