Development of a user-friendly polishing robot system

Polishing work of a freely-curved surface die demands simple and repetitive operations but requires a considerable amount of time for high precision. Some workers tend to gradually avoid the polishing work because of the poor environment caused by dust and noise. In order to reduce the polishing time and solve the problem of the shortage of skilled workers, an automatic polishing system should be developed. In this study, a user-friendly automatic polishing system was developed. It is composed of two different systems: a three-axis machining center and a two-axis polishing robot. The developed polishing system with five degrees of freedom is able to keep the polishing tool normal to the die surface. In order to operate the polishing system, the host computer should transmit the polishing data to the FANUC controller of the machining center and DSP controller of the polishing robot, respectively. A driving program (P-PROS: Pusan National University-polishing robot operating system) in the Windows environment was developed to easily operate the polishing robot system. A communication program was developed for transmitting the polishing data to each controller. To evaluate the performance of the P-PROS and the developed DSP (digital signal processing) controller, a polishing experiment on the shadow-mask die was done.