Surface partitioning in automated CAD-guided tool planning for additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing processes such as spray coating, spray painting and rapid tooling important steps in many products' life cycle. Robotic manipulators are widely adopted to carry out these processes. If done by human operators, the tool planning for these applications is usually time-consuming and the generated tool plans are prone to inaccuracy and errors. This research develops a fully-automated, CAD-guided tool planning system which eliminates the human involvement. Meanwhile, this system can generate optimized tool plans in the sense of robot motion performance. The critical part of this tool planning system is the partitioning of part surfaces into multiple easy-to-handle patches. In this paper, a decomposition-based approach is developed, which models the surface partitioning problem in geometric domain as an integer programming problem in algebraic domain. Experimental tests and evaluation carried out on automotive parts validate this new approach.