Automatic Programming and Control for Robotic Deburring

In the current industrial scenario, robots are rarely used in contact operations such as machining and finishing as they entail complex programming and control methods. Further, the disparity between accuracy specifications, communication technologies and control methods required for such operations calls for greater efforts in robot programming and control. This paper presents a novel approach to automatically program an industrial robot-based on the CAD model of the product variants and to enable online control to minimize errors during a deburring process. The paper starts with the modeling of the product, process and resource (PPR model) which is used to generate robot motion trajectories taking into account the constraints and the free degrees of freedom (DoFs) of the robotic deburring process. The operator selects the edge of the workpiece to be machined, and an automatic program generation system is designed which programs the robot for the deburring process and enables online compensation. A laser scanner sensor device is used for localizing the workpiece in the robot cell and in the online compensation to perform fine corrections of the robot's movement during the process. Experimental results are used to validate the robotic program generation and control mechanism for a deburring process, and to outline the future potential of this work.