Teaching system for a polishing robot using a game joystick

In this paper, a user-friendly teaching system for a polishing robot using a game joystick is proposed. The teaching process is as follows. First, a zigzag path, which depends on both sizes of each object and polishing tool, is prepared. Next, the polishing robot whose control system consists of an impedance model following force controller profiles the object's surface using the zigzag path. In this case, the operator has only to control the orientation of the polishing tool using a usual game joystick. Further, since the impedance model following force controller keeps the contact force to be a desired value, the operator has to give no attention to a sudden overload or noncontact state. Through the above process, the desired trajectory is automatically obtained as the data including both continuous information of the position and its normal vector of the object's surface along the zigzag path. After that, the robot can achieve the polishing task without any assists of the operator by referring to the obtained trajectory. The effectiveness of the proposed method is proved through some experiments on polishing task of a woody material.