Abstract: Placement path planning is one of the key technologies of automated fiber placement, because its reasonability can mean the difference between success and failure to get a high-quality composite product. So reasonable placement path is the prerequisite of composite material processing. According to the requirements of automated fiber placement against placement path, factors affecting path planning are analyzed. To fully exploit its advantage of making calculation convenient, meshed surface method is applied to principal stress method. The placement paths are generated based on placement angle information of discrete points obtained from layer design. An algorithm that traverse the surface from left to right is proposed and the way to select the planning start-point and obtain the placement paths next to the borderline is also discussed. Overlap ratio is introduced to control the extent of fiber overlapping and separating and make prepreg placed on the surface as required . Its feasibility has been verified on path planning software based on VC++.

Key words: fiber placement, meshed surface, principal stress method, traversal method, coverage analysis