Sweep scan path planning for five-axis inspection of free-form surfaces

•An automatic path generation method is proposed for five-axis sweep scan inspection of an arbitrary free-form surface.•The path generation algorithms are composed of two parts, i.e., partition the complex free-form surface into patches with simple elementary shapes and devise algorithms to plan optimal sweep scan paths for each type of the elementary shapes.•Compared to the traditional inspection methods, the generated sweep scan paths take full account of the unique characteristics and working capacities of the five-axis inspection machine and hence significantly improve the inspection efficiency.