Chopper Gun Trajectory Optimization for Spray Forming in Automotive Manufacturing

摘要

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 thickness requirements is still highly challenging due to the complex geometry of free-form surfaces.A CAD-guided chopper gun trajectory generation system for free-form surfaces has been developed in our previous work.A complex surface has to be divided into several patches to satisfy the given constraints.Optimization algorithms are developed to integrate the trajectories of patches to form a trajectory for the free-form surface.A thickness verification method is also provided to verify the generated trajectories.The results of experiments and simulations have shown that the trajectory generation system achieves satisfactory performance.This trajectory generation method can also be applied in many other CAD-guided robot trajectory planning applications.