Path Planning Based On Geodesic Offset Net

Robotic Fiber Placement (RFP) is a new manufacture technique to produce the affordablecomposite materials with low manufacture cost, high efficiency and good quality. RFP has beenwidely applied in aerospace and aviation industry to produce complicated-shaped components inNorth America and Europe. In China, RFP study is in beginning phase now.Path planning of RoboticFiber Placement for composite structures is to obtain the path of the fiber placement head movingonto the mould surface.In this paper, path planning of Robotic Fiber Placement and some related problems are researched.The main works are as follows:(1) Material selection and preparation of the mould surface in the mould surface structure, andpositioning method of the mould surface in design coordinate system are introduced. Besides theprinciples for the design of the mould surface structure are discussed. And analysis of the pathplanning algorithms both at home and abroad is also conducted.(2) The method of calculating geodesic on the surface for the new path planning algorithm isdiscussed. Gives an improved calculation method of the geodesic, based on that derived a new kindmethod to build the iteration algorithm and error control algorithm of geodesic on the surface. At lastthe algorithm is verified and implemented with Matlab.(3) Targeting at path planning of automatic fiber placement for open side composite component, thepaper presents a new path planning algorithm based on geodesic offset net. In contrast to traditionalalgorithm, the new algorithms overcome the shortcomings of large amount of calculation and need tosolve the second order or above ordinary differential equations. Further more, make the cumulativeerror of whole path planning is greatly reduced, thus improve the computation efficiency of theoverall path planning.The project of the research presented in this paper is supported by the National Natural ScienceFoundation of China (51075026).