Path planning for laser scanning with an industrial robot

Reverse Engineering is concerned with the problem of creating CAD models of real objects by measuring point data from their surfaces. Current solutions either require manual interaction or expect the nature of the objects to be known. We believe that in order to create a fully automatic system for RE of unknown objects the software that creates the CAD-model should be able to control the operation of the measuring system. This paper is based on a real implementation of a measuring system controlled by CAD software, capable of measuring along curved paths. Some details of the system have been described in earlier publications. This paper is concerned with the problem of automatic path planning for a system that can move along curved paths.