Automatic Sweep Scan Path Planning for Five-Axis Free-Form Surface Inspection Based on Hybrid Swept Area Potential Field

Sweep scan is an emerging five-axis inspection technology of retrieving geometric data from free-form surfaces. Compared with the traditional surface inspection by coordinate measuring machine (CMM) that works in a point-by-point manner, sweep scan is able to make the stylus tip continuously sweep at high speed on the surface to inspect, whilst acquiring the 3-D point data accurately and efficiently. However, at present, for an arbitrary free-form surface, it still heavily depends on humans to manually generate a suitable sweep scan path. This paper presents a practical sweep scan path planning method, which can automatically generate an efficient sweep scan path for an arbitrary free-form surface. The resultant sweep scan path is able to cater to the shape of the surface to inspect and the unique kinematic characteristics of the typical five-axis inspection machine, so as to achieve a tremendous increase in inspection efficiency. The experiments performed by us show that when compared with some existing automatic sweep scan path generation algorithms such as the simple zigzag method, the proposed method is able to reduce the total inspection time by as much as seven times.