Path Planning With Modification Mechanism In Robotic Fibre Placement Technologies

Robotic Fiber Placement (RFP) is a new manufacture technique to produce the affordable composite materials with low manufacture cost, high efficiency and good quality. RFP has been widely applied in aerospace and aviation industry to produce complicated-shaped components in North America and Europe. In China, RFP study is in beginning phase now. Path planning of Robotic Fiber Placement for composite structures is to obtain the path of the fiber placement head moving onto the mould surface.In this paper, path planning of Robotic Fiber Placement and some relative problems are researched. The main works are as follows:(1) Three principles for the design of mould surface are suggested. And the drawbacks of the traditional whole layer-by-layer placement are pointed out. Analysis of the path planning algorithms both at home and abroad shows obviously that constructing the fiber path with modification mechanism is very necessary in RFP.(2) Present the initial path planning algorithms for both open surface and canal surface, and develop a new path planning algorithm with local modification mechinsm based on the Hermite interpolation. Furthermore , two methods which is based on the above-mentioned algorithms to create the initial path are introduced.(3) Two methods of offsetting and densification are investigated to solve the problem of fibres covering evenly over the mould surface. When there is only one initial path, we can offset the initial one to get the rest paths; when there are two or more initial paths, we can get the rest paths by computing their medial curves. Besides, the offsetting algorithm for implicit surface is proposed. At last, how to use thoses presented methods is also introduced in detail.(4) The main framework of OCC is introduced and graphic interface of OCC is created. Two development kits of OCC are also recommended in this paper, which are BRepBuilderAPI and GC. Moreover, the fiber path simulation software is built on the OCC platform. Hence the system architecture is put forward and the main function modules are designed in detail. At last, the function modules are implemented by programing.The project of the research presented in this paper is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51075026).