Rapid evolution and broad industrial application of sensor systems brings a number of new opportunities for automation and optimization of production processes.
In my research I consider industrial applications which require simultaneous, complete surface processing by tool and monitoring by sensor.
Industrial surface processing by robots – applications such as cleaning, material removal or painting – are characterized by low automation level and consequently remain manually intensive. For automated robot control in such applications we need a solution of the Coverage Path Planning (CPP) problem, which could be performed either off-line or on-line. However, due to the task complexity as well as process dynamics and uncertainties only off-line coverage path planning is mostly not sufficient. Consequently, we require an elastic tool-path adaptation/reshaping algorithm for reaction to on-line process monitoring by sensor. For instance, some sensor is applied for defect recognition (i. e. quality lacks) during surface processing. The goal is to develop a new approach for path re-planning according recognized defects during process execution and with guarantee of the successful task-completeness.
The ongoing research is part of several domains such as on-line coverage path planning, real-time robot control, integration of path planning and execution.