Path planning and pose correction of robot laser cleaning process for specific surfaces of parts

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to solve a series of problems, such as the difficulty in accurately controlling the specific surfaces, and the interference between the laser beam and the parts, when the laser is used to clean mechanical parts with complex surfaces by using robots. Firstly, a region segmentation algorithm of the stereo lithography (STL) model was designed, and the feature surfaces of the model were obtained by using the dihedral angle as the criterion. Then the path points which could easily cause interference between the laser beam and the part to be cleaned were detected by the method of ray intersection, and the pose of the robot was modified according to the normal vector of two non-interference points that were adjacent to the continuous interference points respectively. Finally, the proposed method was validated by scanning path visualization and robot laser cleaning process experiments. The results showed that the robot can successfully clean the specific surface of the test workpiece without interference by following the laser cleaning path generated by the proposed algorithm, and the transition of the robot pose is smooth, which proves the effectiveness of this study. The method is also useful for the path planning of robots in other processing fields.