Distributed Particle Swarm Optimization for the Planning of Time-Optimal and Interference-Free Five-Axis Sweep Scanning Path

Five-axis sweep scanning is an emerging technology, which can achieve precise and efficient contact measurement. However, existing five-axis scanning path planning algorithms either provide a feasible solution without considering measurement efficiency, or optimize the path without considering the interference-free condition. In this article, an algorithm is proposed for generating time-optimal and interference-free five-axis sweep scanning path. The measurement time is estimated by feed rate scheduling methods and used as the cost function of the optimization problem. The interference condition is determined by whether the stylus orientation is within the admissible orientation domain and formulated as the penalty function. The optimization problem is finally solved by the distributed particle swarm optimization to obtain the optimized scanning path. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed method has better measurement efficiency over the other existing five-axis sweep scanning path planning methods and a leading commercial software.