Automated robot trajectory planning for spray painting of free-form surfaces in automotive manufacturing

Automatic trajectory generation for spray painting is highly desirable for today's automotive manufacturing. Generating paint gun trajectories for free-form surfaces to satisfy paint thickness requirements is still highly challenging due to the complex geometry of free-from surfaces. In this paper, a CAD-guided paint gun trajectory generation system for free-form surfaces has been developed. A paint thickness verification method is also provided to verify the generated trajectories. The results of experiments and simulations show that the trajectory generation system achieves satisfactory performance. This trajectory generation system can also be applied to generate trajectories for many other CAD-guided robot trajectory planning applications.