Hybrid path planning method based on skeleton contour partitioning for robotic additive manufacturing

Establishing manufacturability design criteria for multidimensional complex parts can significantly reduce the production cost, shorten the manufacturing cycle, and improve the production quality of directed energy deposition. Therefore, there is an urgent need to establish a high-performance manufacturing design strategy for complex parts. Proposed here is a skeleton contour partitioning hybrid path-planning method that takes full advantage of the excellent geometric reducibility of the contour offset method and the outstanding flexibility of the zigzag path method, eliminating the influences of sharp corners and degradation on forming quality in the contour offset method. First, reference contours are obtained by subjecting the original contours to an inward–outward twice-offset process; incompletely filled regions are obtained by Boolean operations on the original and reference contours, and these regions are the ones to be optimized. Second, the optimized regions are merged into skeleton fill regions, and the fill paths are generated by a polygon trapezoidal partitioning recombination algorithm and an algorithm for generating optimal zigzag paths. Finally, the contour offset paths are split and regrouped based on the skeleton regions and are connected into a continuous forming path for each subregion, then all the forming paths are converted into robot printing tool paths from the skeleton-region filling paths to the contour-offset ones. The actual forming results for several parts with different geometric features are verified and compared with those of the traditional path-planning method, and it is concluded that the proposed method converges rapidly to the details of complex components and is highly feasible and applicable.