The angle cutting robot system in the shipbuilding industry

Abstract

This paper presents a novel design and application of the angle cutting robot system in the shipbuilding industry. The angle cutting robot system can cut end-cuts and hole-cuts with various shapes as well as it can print some frame lines, a bend line and a label on an angle. The angle cutting robot system has two parallel production lines considering work circumstance and work efficiency. This system performs five-stage process such as loading, transferring, printing, cutting and grinding. For a high cutting quality, the hybrid gantry robot with 3 prismatic joints and 3 revolute joints was designed to get a high positioning accuracy. In addition, a shape measuring system was developed to figure out an actual dimension of an angle. The developed angle cutting robot system was installed and has been operating in a shipyard. This system makes it possible to replace hard manual workers with robots and to improve both productivity and quality of angles.