Autonomous Trajectory Planning for Spray Painting on Complex Surfaces Based on a Point Cloud Model

Using teach pendants or offline programming methods can generate tool paths for robot manipulators to carry out production activities, such as spray painting on objects of different geometries. This task, in which the complexity of painting the surface is one of the main challenges, requires highly skilled operators. In addition, the time spent setting up a robot task can be justified for the mass production of the same workpiece. However, it is inconvenient for low-production and high-variation production lines. In order to overcome these challenges, this study presents an algorithm to autonomously generate robot trajectories for a spray-painting process applied to objects with complex surfaces based on input 3D point cloud data. A predefined spherical mesh wraps the object, organizing the geometrical attributes into a structured data set. Subsequently, the region of interest is extracted and isolated from the model, which serves as the basis for the automatic path-planning operation. A user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) is developed to define input parameters, visualize the point cloud model and the generated trajectory, simulate paint quality using a color map, and ultimately generate the robot’s code. A 3D sensor is used to localize the pose of the workpiece ahead of the robot and adjust the robot’s trajectory. The efficacy of the proposed approach is validated first by using various workpieces within a simulated environment and second by employing a real robot to execute the motion task.