Skeleton Curve-Guided Five-Axis Sweep Scanning for Surface With Multiple Holes

Although surface with multiple holes (SMHs) is widely used in industrial components, the precise inspection of SMH is a knotty task due to the inefficiency of traditional surface inspection technology. Recently, a five-axis surface sweep scanning approach is emerging and shows great potential to boost the surface inspection efficiency by sensing surface in a continuous sweep scanning way. However, an efficient sweep scanning path should cater to the unique kinematic characteristics of the five-axis inspection system. In this article, we present an approach to automatically generate efficient five-axis sweep scanning paths for inspecting SMH. First, the skeleton of SMH is extracted along with the surface partitioned into several patches, based on which a guiding curve-based sweep scanning path can be defined for each surface patch. By modeling the skeleton of SMH as a directed Euler graph and finding a proper sequence to traverse the graph, a continuous five-axis sweep scanning path is then generated to sweep all patches without any transition among them. The nonsweeping time could be eliminated so that the sweep scanning efficiency is drastically improved in this way. Simulation and physical inspection experiments are conducted on two SMHs, showing that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, such as the popular zigzag method and the method from the leading commercial software of RENISHAW.
Note to Practitioners
—This article aims to generate an efficient sweep scanning path of a five-axis coordinate measuring machine (CMM) for inspecting the SMHs of a precision component, such as an engine block or a gearbox cover. Although traditional five-axis CMM path generation methods can be applied to SMH inspection, most of them are designed for the point-by-point inspection mode, which intrinsically suffers from extremely low efficiency. Recently, an emerging five-axis surface sweep scanning technology shows great potential for boosting the efficiency of surface inspection by using a continuous surface sensing stylus mounted on a rapid rotary probe head. The realization of high-speed five-axis surface scanning depends on a proper sweep scanning path which takes advantage of the superior kinematic performance of the rotary probe head as much as possible and accordingly avoids assigning heavy workload to the three linear axes with weaker kinematic performance. However, up to date, only a handful of five-axis sweep scanning path planning methods are reported and mainly focus on the simple and compact surface. Therefore, existing methods are incompetent to generate a suitable sweep scanning path for high-speed inspection of SMH. For these reasons, we present a novel and practical approach to automatically generate a continuous five-axis sweep scanning path for complex SMH. The generated path exactly meets the unique kinematic requirements of high-speed five-axis inspection and eliminates all noninspection operations. In this way, the SMH inspection can be accomplished with high efficiency.