A robotic system for rapid prototyping

Author

Tse, W.C. ; Chen, Y.H.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Mech. Eng., Hong Kong Univ., Hong Kong

Volume

3

fYear

1997

fDate

20-25 Apr 1997

Firstpage

1815

Abstract

Reducing prototyping time is a good way to make the product development cycle shorter. This can be achieved in two ways: one is to develop new prototyping technologies like stereolithography apparatus (SLA), selective laser sintering (SLS) etc.; the other is to improve the principal existing technique which is CNC based method. In this paper, a robotic system for rapid prototyping which is an enhancement of the CNC based method is presented. A robot arm holding a milling tool is used to machine the prototype of a solid model drawn in commercial CAD systems. The rough cut and finish cut NC tool path for the robot arm are generated automatically from the solid model of an object. Objects may have different kinds of surfaces e.g. planar surface, general quadratic surface, B-spline surface and compound surface. The proposed method is implemented on the AutoCAD platform. A number of produced prototypes have shown satisfactory results

Keywords

CAD/CAM; computerised numerical control; industrial manipulators; machine tools; machining; software packages; solid modelling; AutoCAD platform; B-spline surface; CNC based method; commercial CAD systems; compound surface; finish cut NC tool path; general quadratic surface; milling tool; planar surface; rapid prototyping; robot arm; robotic system; rough cut NC tool path; solid model; Computer numerical control; Laser sintering; Product development; Prototypes; Robotics and automation; Robots; Rough surfaces; Solid modeling; Stereolithography; Surface roughness;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation, 1997. Proceedings., 1997 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Albuquerque, NM

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3612-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ROBOT.1997.619051

Filename

619051