Analysis of system performance for robotic spray forming process

Abstract

Automatic chopper gun trajectory generation for spray forming is highly desirable for today's automotive manufacturing. Generating chopper gun trajectories for free-form surfaces to satisfy the given requirements is still highly challenging due to the complex geometry of free-form surfaces and the spray gun model. A CAD-guided chopper gun trajectory generation system for both uniform and nonuniform material distribution of free-form surfaces has been developed in our previous work. A material distribution model is also presented. To verify the developed algorithms, experiments were performed. In this paper, the experimental results are presented and compared with the simulation results. The results demonstrate that the developed trajectory generation system can be applied to generate trajectories for free-form surfaces such that the material distribution requirements can be satisfied. Also, the material distribution model can be used to compute the material distribution for free-form surfaces. This trajectory generation method can also be applied to generate trajectories for many other CAD-guided robot trajectory planning applications. © 2005 IEEE.