Collision-free path planning for efficient inspection of free-form surface by using a trigger probe

Measurement path planning plays an essential role in on-machine measurement, which is often required to be time-saving and collision-free. This paper proposes a novel path planning methodology and develops an automatic collision avoidance strategy for measurement. Measurement points are generated by contour section sampling, grid mesh sampling, and locally dense sampling from the free-form surface based on the usage. Afterwards, a shortest-path algorithm and a non-interference path algorithm are developed to solve the sequence planning results. In order to simplify the calculation expense of collision-free paths, the safe-plane-based method (SPM) is introduced. Moreover, the optimized SPM is proposed to minimize the whole measurement path of SPM. The simulations show that the proposed methods can reduce the total measurement distance to nearly 15% than the zigzag method and the safe-plane-based method.