Automatic Tool Path Planning Strategy Based on Feature Extraction of 3D Models

Abstract

The direction of the end-effector is fixed in most of industrial robot applications, such as grinding, welding and spraying. The sixth axis of 6R industrial robot is the redundant freedom for these applications. This paper uses the redundant freedom to make orientation planning. In addition, most of time tool paths for these applications may be composed of some short and complex curves. It is difficult and time-consuming for online teaching method to make tool path planning. Therefore, an off-line programming(OLP) method was adopt to solve these problems in this paper. The path planning strategy and the orientation planning strategy were proposed and applied into the OLP system to generate the tool path automatically for these applications.