Question: Ignoring inner surface

[gzaidner]

Hello,
I converted my .stl to .ply and run the "plane_slicer_rastering_generator_demo.launch".
It finds the paths but also on the inner side of the object.
Is there an option to select only the top object paths?
I dont want the robot to reach those points.

thank you

u

[marip8]

Currently the plane-slice style tool path planners (plane-slice and surface-walk) intersect planes of a specifiable height with the mesh to generate the raster lines. If the plane cuts through multiple mesh layers, it will create multiple raster lines (as you experienced), and there is no method currently for choosing which to keep.

Your best option is going to be removing the inner surface from your mesh and running the tool path planner with only the surface you care about. This is typically what I do when using this repository. You can do that in a variety of ways:

• Remove the surface in CAD (assuming your mesh comes from a CAD model you have)
• Segment the mesh in Meshlab
  • .stl and .ply files can be composed of multiple discrete surface bodies (especially if they are exported from CAD files). Meshlab has a tool called "Split in Connected Components" from the Layer dialog that will separate these bodies so they can be saved individually. Your mesh might have two bodies in the file that could be easily separated this way
• Ambient occlusion filtering (Meshlab, Blender)
• The mesh segmentation library in this repository may also be able to segment one surface from another
• If the surfaces are not connected, you could write your own code to parse through the vertices and edges of the mesh and find all separate surfaces

If you are using the surface-walk planner, you could potentially also reduce the height of the cutting plane. However, if you mesh layers are close together, you probably can't make the cutting plane height small enough to go through only one layer while still cutting the full height of the mesh along its length.