Automatic robot taping: system integration

Industrial robot arm has been used in a lot of applications, but most of them require manual teaching from the operator, or careful path-planning by experienced programmer. Offline programming is one of the solution for more sophisticated applications, but the 3D model of the workpiece should be provided, especially for applications such as painting, thermal spraying, etc. With the increasing availability of 3D scanner and cheap RGB-D camera such as Kinect (with its 3D model generation algorithm, Kinect Fusion), the 3D model of the object can be generated with lesser effort. This paper discusses the integration of scanning, path planning, and control of robot to achieve a complicated task: Automated Robot Taping. Kinect and 3D scanner Artec Eva were used to generate the 3D model, and a taping tool (attached to an industrial robot arm) was designed and manufactured. Based on the 3D model, a path planning algorithm was developed to generate the robot trajectory. To validate the system, some experiments have been conducted, and the automatic taping has been successfully done on the actual object. The application that is considered here is automatic taping, where a workpiece surface is to be covered by a masking tape, to be protected during plasma spraying. The overal framework, however, can be used for other applications such as painting, thermal spraying, etc.