Automated Path and Trajectory Planning for Automated Repair of Damaged Components by Cold Spray

Cold spraying has emerged as a promising technique for the repair of metallic components. For controlled material deposition, manipulation of the cold spray gun is performed by industrial robots. Such robot-guided cold spraying provides flexible control and automation of the entire process. To enable effective and material-efficient material deposition at specified repair locations, this work proposes a method for automated planning of cold spray paths and trajectories. The method begins with the extraction of the volume to be filled by comparing the nominal and actual component. To produce the extracted volume, it is divided into suitable adaptively curved layers and converted into point clouds for path planning. The cold spray path is then converted into a trajectory by adding a suitable velocity distribution for the spray velocity to produce the required locally varying layer thickness. To validate the suitability of the path and trajectory, a simulation of the material deposition is performed. In addition, the implementation of the entire method is demonstrated by exemplary use cases. The results demonstrate that the proposed method enables successful automated path and trajectory planning, both contributing to the overall goal of automated repair of damaged components by cold spray.