Evaluation of path planning strategies in automated honeycomb potting

Abstract:
Automated honeycomb potting is a key technology to achieve flexible and economical automation of sandwich panels, which is required to meet the demand for more individualized aircraft cabins. A necessary component hereby is a CAD/CAM workflow to support program generation. The automated potting process is similar to extrusion-based additive manufacturing (AM) but not covered by the AMSC or current research. We therefore evaluate the performance of classical path planning algorithms and propose a novel approach to path planning to solve the new challenges that the material properties and the filling of closed cavities pose. Whilst conducted experiments show that available solutions can be adopted to fulfill the process requirements, they impose unacceptable manual effort for path generation. Our open-source based implementation of the newly developed algorithm allows for completely automated program generation with similar or even higher performance during processing.