Collision-Free Path Planning for Quality Inspection of Helicopter Components

Due to the characteristics of high precision, coordinate measuring machine (CMM) is widely used in the aerospace manufacturing industry. Path planning is an integral part of coordinate measurement. In the actual measurement process of helicopter components, a single inspection feature often involves multiple measurement characteristics. However, traditional path planning schemes often overlook this, leading to frequent manual point layout or the need for multiple measurements in multiple poses. This results in a significant waste of time and labor costs. Therefore, in order to improve the efficiency of path generation and measurement involving multiple features, this research proposes an improved MultiAnt Colony Optimization Genetic Algorithm to form a path planning model for helicopter components with multiple features. Considering the characteristics of multiple features of helicopter components, the model first plans the path between features based on the nearest point pair algorithm, and then sets ant colonies to find local optimal solutions on different measurement features respectively. To address collision issues in path planning, a collision avoidance algorithm based on model topology information is proposed, which can solve most common collision problems. Finally, through simulation experiment of a helicopter rotor connector, the effectiveness of the proposed solution is demonstrated.