Abstract

This paper proposes a set of trajectory generation strategies for industrial robots that use ray-casting over the workpiece CAD model for various manufacturing operations. By employing ray-casting on a triangular-mesh representation of the production part, points can be generated across the entire surface without extracting geometric features such as curves, edges, or planes. This approach enables the development of diverse point-generation methods with distinct characteristics, adaptable to the specific requirements of each part and manufacturing process. The developed algorithms achieve results comparable to existing robot programming methods, and, when integrated into the specialized offline programming environment, they enable flexible trajectory generation for operations such as sanding, milling, adhesive deposition, and painting. Finally, these trajectories are automatically exported in a syntax that ensures rapid integration of the point sequence into a base program compatible with an articulated robot controller. The results show that the proposed methods can effectively generate trajectories for sanding and milling using two different robots.