Max orientation coverage: efficient path planning to avoid collisions in the CNC milling of 3D objects

Most path planning algorithms for covering a complex 3D object ignore physical limitations or constraints on a robot’s motion. Adhering to such constraints for a given path can slow down the time to cover the path because the motion may need to be adjusted. This work considers a scenario in computer numerical control (CNC) milling applications, where the robot is a cutting tool that needs to cover the surface of a complex 3D object under the following constraint: for every point on the generated path, the robot must be assigned an accessible orientation to avoid collisions between it and other parts of the object. Our proposed approach, which we call max orientation coverage, employs a two-step optimization scheme. It can improve path efficiency with respect to both the length of the path and the cost of dealing with the collision-avoiding constraints. We evaluate our approach through extensive simulation studies on four CAD benchmarks against a state-of-the-art baseline. We show that our proposed approach can improve the efficiency of the path by 29.7% on average compared with the baseline and the improvement goes up to 46.5% for certain complex objects.

大多数覆盖复杂3D对象的算法忽略了机器人运动的物理局限性或对给定路径的限制。计算机数值控制（CNC）铣削应用程序中的方案，其中机器人是一个切割工具，需要在以下约束下覆盖复杂3D对象的表面：对于生成的路径上的每个点，必须为机器人分配一个可访问的方向为了避免对象的其他部分之间的碰撞。借助避免碰撞的约束，我们通过针对最新基线的四个CAD基准进行了广泛的模拟研究。对于某些复杂对象，基线和改进高达46.5％。