Path Planning for Spray Painting Robot of Horns Surfaces in Ship Manufacturing

Generating paint gun path for complex free-form surfaces in shipbuilding industry to ensure uniform paint deposition is highly challenging due to their complex geometry, especially for horns surfaces. In this paper, a tool trajectory optimization method was proposed based on dip angle spray in order to solve the problems of poor coating uniformity and material waste for spraying horns surface with curved patches. A dip angle spray model was developed based on the Beta distribution model on the planar surface by principle of differential geometry. The spray path optimization models for dip angle spraying on cylindrical surfaces of three cases were proposed and compared first to define the best case which yields the best painting quality. Then we used the best strategy on a horns surface in a shipyard to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of designed algorithm. This algorithm can also be extended to other applications.