A Robot System for High Quality Belt Grinding and Polishing Processes

摘要

Due to the tendency of the globalization of markets and competition from low wage countries, it is profitable for the industry to further automate the robot-controlled grinding and polishing system, especially in the sanitary fitting industry. The high automation level of the robot system not only relieves the human being from laborious tasks, but also elevates the efficiency of the whole manufacturing process by producing a steady product surface quality. A framework of such a robot system is put forward in this paper. The automation of the robot system focuses on two parts. One is to facilitate the grinding and polishing paths planning processes. Software is developed to help the operator to generate the grinding and polishing paths quickly and easily. It offsets the incapability of universal off-line programming systems for grinding and polishing. With this new software the tasks that had to be done by high-specialized staff before can now be taken over by normal operators. To help the operator to design the paths, the belt grinding process and its simulation are carefully studied. Another key point of the automation is to automatically find and classify the defects on the workpiece surface into some pre-defined classes in order to apply an according compensating machining process. The detection of the defects is already realized while the classification should be improved in the future work. This research and development project was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) within the national "Research In Production For Tomorrow" Programme and managed by the Project Agency for Production and Manufacturing Technologies (PFT), Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe