Coverage Path Planning for Robotic Laser Surfacing Applications Based on 3D Scanning

Robotic laser surfacing technology is gaining popularity in many industrial branches and there is a need for an autonomous system combining the robotic laser surfacing technology with the rapidly evolving area of industrial machine vision. This paper presents the tool path trajectory planning module of our software designed to control a 9 DoF robotic work cell with a laser surface modification equipment based on scanned data from a robot-mounted 3D camera. Our method respects the specific requirements of the laser surfacing technology as well as the possibilities and limitations of the physical system containing an industrial robot on a linear rail and an additional two-axis servo positioner. This paper describes the whole technique of our scanning-based robot navigation system including the workpiece scanning, model creation, coverage trajectory planning, simulation and execution of the robotic laser surfacing process.