Path Planning for Industrial Robots in Free-Form Surface Polishing

The surface roughness of mold affects the product quality and the surface quality of the blade and aircraft has a direct impact on stability and reliability of related equipment, so the polishing plays an important role in manufacturing industry. Conventional industrial robots provide teaching pendant to plan the path, while the teaching of free-form surface is difficult and complicated. This paper utilizes the offline programming to plan the path. Before the path planning, we read STL format files of the free-form surface objects and build topology relations. Comparing the direction-parallel and contour-parallel path patterns, we find that the direction-parallel pattern needs less degree of freedom and is much easier to avoid physical interventions and mechanic singularity, so we adopt the direction-parallel method to plan the path at last. We solve the intersection between the cutting plane and free-form surface based on the topology relations. We develop a simulation platform using the C++ and OpenGL and conduct the experiment. The experiment proves that the path generated by direction-parallel method based on topology relations is accurate.