Optimal spray gun trajectory planning with variational distribution for forming process

Automated chopper gun trajectory planning 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 complexity of problems. Automated trajectory planning for constant material distribution has been widely studied. However, achieving a variational (non-uniform) material distribution has not been addressed. A CAD-guided chopper gun trajectory planning system with non-uniform material distribution for free-form surfaces is presented. A multi-objective constrained optimization problem is formulated. The simulation results have shown that this system achieves performance required by production applications. This trajectory planning algorithm can also be applied to generate trajectories for other CAD-guided robot trajectory planning applications.