Path Generation for Robotic Polishing of Free-form Surfaces

This paper develops an off-line programming system to generate tool paths for robotic polishing. The system extracts CAD data from STL format files of free-form surfaces and builds topology relations of triangular facets. We adopt direction-parallel path pattern, since it needs less degrees of freedom and is much easier to avoid the physical intervention and the dynamic singularity. We incorporate topology relations of triangular facets into the direction-parallel path generation algorithm with equal axis intervals, so this can remove the redundant data and facilitate the efficiency of path generation. Again, we propose the constant contour interval path generation algorithm, which can generate paths with equal contour intervals. The generated paths with equal contour intervals are desired for robotic polishing. We implement the off-line programming system based on Qt and OpenGL. The system can generate accurate and uniform paths of free-form surfaces, such as the turbine blade surface and the propeller blade surface.