Constraints Evaluation and Working Methodology for Laser Scanning of Free-Form Surfaces

This research presents a working methodology for developing an automatic planning system of the scanning process of free-form surfaces. The surface has been modelled using a STL format, that permits the automatic recognizing of any type of surface. This work does only consider collision-free orientations that guarantee the visibility of the zone to scan and that are compatible with the constraints imposed by the process parameters. In order to speed up the calculation of these orientations, different methods like back-face culling and space partitioning techniques, such as kd-trees, are applied. Once the space occupied by the part is partitioned in regions, recursive ray traversal algorithms are used in order to check for intersection exclusively the part triangles (STL) that can potentially be traversed by each laser beam direction