Surface Parameterization and Trajectory Generation on Regular Surfaces with Application in Robot-Guided Deposition Printing

In this work, we present a novel approach to design and carry out trajectories over regular curved surfaces. This has application in a number of robot path planning problems, including our primary interest in deposition printing. Existing solutions are often ad-hoc in terms of path generation and control of robot pose and velocity. Our approach provides a unified methodology for surface fitting from 3D surface measurements and mapping a curve from 2D onto a 3D surface with minimal distortion. Robot pose control is investigated to guide the end effector along the trajectory while maintaining a standoff distance and keeping the end effector normal to the surface. Simulations and experiments show the performance and necessity of our approach in the application of deposition printing on different 3D surfaces.