Efficient skeleton curve-guided five-axis sweep scanning based on optimal traversing of multiple connected skeleton curves

The five-axis sweep scanning approach is an emerging surface inspection technology which could tremendously boost the inspection efficiency through working in the way of continuous scanning. While inspecting the surfaces with multiple connected skeleton curves, the topological complexity brings conflict between achieving efficient inspection and working in continuous manner. Recently, a skeleton curve-guided five-axis sweep scanning method was proposed to tackle this problem but the resulting inspection path has to inspect the entire surface in a round-trip way. The manner of round-trip inspection pulls down the entire inspection efficiency and should be avoided as much as possible. In this paper, we present an improved skeleton curve-guided five-axis sweep scanning method to generate a more efficient five-axis scanning path for the surface with multiple connected skeleton curves. The proposed method starts from the framework of existing skeleton curve-guided five-axis sweep scanning method. Under the unique kinematic requirements of efficient five-axis sweep scanning, an integer linear programming optimization approach is utilized to optimally connect the inspection paths on independent surface patches and form a shorter skeleton curve-based sweep scanning path as compared with the existing skeleton curve-guided five-axis sweep scanning method. The resulting inspection path is composed of the single-pass inspection for most of the surface and the round-trip inspection for a small part of the surface. The comparison experiments are conducted on two surfaces with multiple connected skeleton curves. Experiment results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the method provided by the leading commercial software Apexblade and the original skeleton curve-guided five-axis sweep scanning method.

Automated summary

This paper presents an improved skeleton curve-guided five-axis sweep scanning method for generating a more efficient scanning path for surfaces with multiple connected skeleton curves. By utilizing an integer linear programming optimization approach, the connection of inspection paths on independent surface patches is optimized, resulting in a shorter scanning path. Experimental results show that this method outperforms other methods.