A novel trajectory planning method for mobile robotic grinding wind turbine blade

Abstract

As the core component of wind turbine, wind turbine blade requires two grinding processes in the production. However, mobile robotic automation grinding of wind turbine blades is considered to be a challenging task due to the high aspect ratio and compound surface of the wind turbine blade. The trajectories generated by most robotic grinding trajectory planning algorithms are often found to be inferior in grinding large compound surface workpieces, as they are typically designed for robotic machining with a fixed base. In this paper, a novel iso-planar algorithm based on oriented bounding box (OBB) of the workpiece is developed to plan the grinding trajectories by taking into consideration the characteristics of blade. The constant chord length algorithm employing Taylor quadratic expansion is then developed to discretize trajectory into grinding points. Considering the characteristics of compound surface, a post-processing strategy is proposed to eliminate redundant grinding points and generate consistent tool orientations on compound surface. Based on these three steps, a workstation location optimization model for improving robot manipulability is introduced to determine a series of workstation locations. Furthermore, the grinding and movement synchronization strategy based on mobile platform trajectory interpolation is proposed to enhance the efficiency of machining large workpieces. The simulation and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed trajectory planning method for mobile robotic grinding wind turbine blade, the rationality of the optimization model and the feasibility of grinding and movement synchronization strategy.