Automated and Cycle Time Optimized Path Planning for Robot-Based Inspection Systems

Robot-based inspection systems, consisting of a standard industrial robot and an optical 3D sensor, increasingly gain importance within production in order to quantify the quality of products. These systems show advantages in terms of costs, flexibility and in-line capability. Based on the inspection plan of a product, the robot path for the inspection system is currently planned manually which is a very time consuming process. Consequently, an automated path planning algorithm generating a time optimized and collision-free path would improve the flexibility of robot-based inspection systems. The presented approach shows an automated and cycle time optimized path planning algorithm for robot-based inspection systems. This is realized by the probabilistic roadmap method applied on all measurement poses in combination with the A∗search algorithm for the determination of weighted paths. Finally, the optimization of the path is reduced to a traveling salesman problem which is solved by the Christofides heuristic.