A general method of trajectory generation based on point-cloud structures in automatic fibre placement

Abstract

In the process of manufacturing fibre reinforced composite components with automatic fibre placement(AFP), trajectory generation is the core technology that determines the quality and efficiency of fibre placement and the performance of formed components. This study overcome the limitation that traditional algorithms only consider parameter surfaces or mesh surfaces and study a general method of AFP trajectory generation based on point-cloud structures. Firstly, we proposed a directed projection providing a theoretical guarantee for the subsequent trajectory generation on moulds represented by point-clouds; Secondly, we provided two different solvers named numerical and direct approach to generate initial trajectories and subsequent offsetting trajectories. Our numerical simulations and error analyses show that proposed tactics are well suitable for point-cloud structures and could generate full coverage trajectories within a tiny error without gaps and overlaps. The proposed method is absolutely different from the traditional method and does not need to mesh or reconstruct the point-cloud, but it can directly generate trajectories on point-clouds, thus avoid errors in surface reconstruction and reduce processes of AFP trajectory generation.