Path planning of airfoil surface for robotic fibre placement

In this paper, a new path planning algorithm based on triangular meshes of the airfoil open surface for four commonly used laying angles in robotic fibre placement is presented. In the proposed algorithm, the 0° paths are computed by the slicing method, the ±45° paths are obtained by general rotation transformation, and the method to equally divide arc is adopted to get the 90° paths which can ensure that the complete fibre tows distributed evenly on the surface connect the root and tip part. Then the redundant path points are deleted, the final path points are obtained to generate the poses of the fibre placement head which is mounted at the robot manipulator´s end-effector. Finally the simulation is carried out in software RobotStudio and the effect of laying is displayed using OpenGL. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.