Automated CAD-guided robot path planning for spray painting of compound surfaces

In this paper, a CAD-guided robot path generator is developed for the spray painting of compound surfaces commonly seen in automotive manufacturing. Instead of widely used parametric representation of surfaces, a planar facet scheme is used to approximate the painting surfaces. As a result, a new combinatorial gun path planning algorithm is proposed. In this algorithm, big patches are formed by stitching small surfaces together. Therefore, the path planning is solved based on the global characteristics of tire part, and the resulting spray gun paths are well-behaved in the sense of time, coverage, and wastage. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and tested using ROBCAD/sup TM//Paint.