Traction control of space tubular shaped mandrel and detection of preform braiding angle

The braiding quality of composite preforms has a significant influence on their mechanical properties. To address the difficulties in the design of the processing technology and the stability of the surface quality of the fabric during the braiding process of the spatial special-shaped mandrel, a robot control method was proposed for prefabrication. Regarding branding of the formed body and inspection of the braiding angle of the fabric by machine vision for quality control, in this study the spatial special-shaped mandrel was discretized, the position and attitude of the tool center point were calculated, and the robot pulling speed was calculated. The calculation was performed to realize the automatic compensation of the braiding angle and, finally, the braiding angle of the fabric surface was detected by machine vision. The experimental results showed that the control method could effectively reduce the braiding angle error of the preform within ±2° through the detection of the visual inspection algorithm and could improve the quality of the preform and the detection speed of the braiding angle in actual production.