Path planning for automatic robotic blade grinding

This paper presents a robotic blade grinding system controlled by a PC and a robot controller. The system consists of a six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) industrial robot, a flexible belt grinding machine and a control computer. Robotic blade grinding operation is performed by mounting the turbine blade to the robot flange and executing the robot program to move the robot along a trajectory while maintaining contact with the contact wheel of the abrasive belt grinding machine. Since the blade grinding process is complicated and mainly operated by skilled workers, it is not practical to program the industrial robot with a teach pendant manually. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of path planning for the robotic blade grinding automatically. The robot program which contains the grinding path is generated by PC. Finally, the generated path is successfully applied in robotic blade grinding system. The experiment results prove that the proposed method is effective and feasible.