Throughout human evolution, any occupation that is labor-intensive and harmful to human health will eventually be replaced by high-tech equipment. Spray painting is a prime example of robots replacing human labor. In 1969, a Norwegian company first experimented with this technology. After decades of advancement, the technology has matured and is widely used in industries such as automotive, mobile phones, and hardware and bathroom fixtures. Spray painting offers high productivity and is suitable for both manual and automated production. Its applications primarily include hardware, plastics, furniture, military, and shipbuilding, making it the most widely used coating method today. Spraying requires cleanroom environments ranging from millions to tens of thousands of yuan. Spraying equipment includes spray guns, spray booths, paint supply rooms, curing/drying ovens, workpiece conveying equipment, mist removal, and wastewater and exhaust gas treatment equipment. The primary challenges with spray painting are the highly dispersed paint mist and volatile solvents, which pollute the environment, harm human health, waste paint, and cause economic losses. Consequently, spray robots emerged.

From the perspective of OEMs, the current spray painting robot market is still dominated by foreign companies, with European, American, and Japanese companies holding absolute market share. These companies primarily include Switzerland's ABB and Stäubli, Germany's Kuka, Japan's FANUC, Yaskawa, Kawasaki, and Italy's Comau. While each company has its own strengths in spray painting technology, there are also certain differences in price, system design, and performance from the perspective of system integrators and customer experience. Due to limitations in parameters such as joint degrees of freedom and arm length, different painting robots have varying effective reach for spraying. Spray painting robots are increasingly widely used in the automotive painting process. Their significant advantage is that they can simultaneously produce multiple models on the same production line, improving automation and production efficiency. The quality of painting robots on the market varies, and choosing high-quality robots ensures optimal painting performance. For automakers, high-precision robotic technology is not what they need and can instead pose significant challenges to future production operations. These challenges include training maintenance personnel, supporting process upgrades, and maintaining spare parts inventory. Therefore, users need equipment that is simple yet not simplistic, easy to learn and master, stable and effective, and with relatively low operating and maintenance costs. Furthermore, the quality of vehicle body spraying depends largely on the paint properties. Therefore, how to rationally design the spray trajectory based on different paint properties and vehicle body shapes to achieve the best spray quality is also a topic worth exploring.