Efficient measurement of fibre orientation for mapping carbon fibre parts with a robotic system

Abstract

The strength of carbon fibre parts depends on the fibre arrangements all over them, but only manual and sparse checks are usually executed to assess their quality. Here, we present an automatic method for computing the fibre orientations in each part point and mapping them onto the 3D model of the part. This process is automated by a robot that moves the measurement sensor above the object to be scanned. Since this sensor needs to acquire multiple images of the same point with different illuminations for correctly estimating the fibre orientation, we developed algorithms for online image registration in presence of translational sensor motion. Moreover, we propose real-time methods for projection of the estimated orientation vectors to a 3D model. Experiments show that this software allows the accurate and fast mapping of carbon fibre parts by means of an industrial robot. Accuracy assessments report a measurement accuracy below 5°.