On the development of an haptic tool based autonomous polishing system

摘要

Automated polishing often relies on the toolpath generation based on a CAD model. This task is time-consuming, human skilled dependent and struggles to deal with the inaccuracy of parts to be finished. Manual labour is still very used for being capable of adapting to said inaccuracy, but also very dependent on individual polishers’ ability, thus not granting consistent results. In addition, this task is associated with health issues and also quite tedious. Automated finishing can be accomplished using robots or dedicated automation systems. Research has shown that force control based systems can be used to perform finishing operations. Hence, automated finishing often requires expensive hardware, generally using 6 axis force sensors or requiring custom-built equipment depending on the part geometry. Moreover, most automated polishing solutions struggle to adapt to radical changes in part geometry. The research work focuses on the use of simple force monitoring solutions to guide the automatic generation of a polishing toolpath without resorting to CAM techniques. The work is oriented toward industrial applications. A force monitoring device is conceptualized, simulated, and developed using off the shelf components and a rotational spindle is used on an industrial robot. The research is performed based on simulations in ABB’s RobotStudio and other in-house developed software. Results are tested using an ABB IRB1600 industrial robot to verify their feasibility for polishing operations for the tooling industry.