CAD‐based automated robot trajectory planning for spray painting of free‐form surfaces

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‐form surfaces. In this paper, a CAD‐guided paint gun trajectory generation system for free‐form surfaces has been developed. The system utilizes the CAD information of a free‐form surface to be painted and a paint gun model to generate a paint gun trajectory to satisfy the paint thickness requirements. A paint thickness verification method is also provided to verify the generated trajectories. The simulation results have shown 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.