Abstract
In order to reduce the process uncertainty and the labor intensity in manual metal arc spraying for rapid tooling, this paper presents a robot wrist design and a robot motion control method based on the cross-sectional contours and related surface normal vectors extracted from STL model, a de facto standard for representing a 3D part geometry in rapid prototyping (RP) industry. A computer controlled five-axis robot for the rapid tooling was built by using the wrist, which drives the spraying gun. The wrist comprises a linkage that can maintain the working position of the gun while changing its spraying orientation freely. Such a design ensures that adjusting the gun along the normal of the master surface to satisfy the process requirement will not result in any position change of the spraying point. A kinematic analysis on the wrist indicates this kinematic decoupling between the positioning mechanism and the orientating mechanism. The working trajectory of the gun is generated off-line by slicing the STL model of the master pattern. To bypass the need for any teaching or NC programming, the arc-spraying robot can carry out the tooling process automatically and efficiently fully based on the sliced data of the master pattern. In addition, a case study on the production of automobile body panel dies using this robotic tooling system is introduced.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (No.2001AA421270) and the Key Technologies R&D Programme of China in the Tenth Five-Year Plan Period (No.2001BA203B10-01).
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He, Z., Lu, B., Hong, J. et al. A novel arc-spraying robot for rapid tooling. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 31, 1012–1020 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-005-0264-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-005-0264-x