Development of a force controlled robot for grinding, chamfering and polishing

This paper presents a force controlled robot system for grinding, chamfering and polishing in machining plants. To facilitate easy operations, a task-oriented robot language and a force control method for following the edges of workpieces have been developed. In the task-oriented robot language, a task is declared first by a task name, a tool code and a tool center point. The tool center point is a position in contact with a workpiece. These indexes and the force control motion command determine the parameters for the force control of the robot. The workpieces for grinding, chamfering, and polishing almost always differ their setting positions, their sizes and/or their shapes, even when the workpieces are the same parts in a machine. To cope with the workpiece difference, a tool moment control method, a skip function, and a round function have been developed. Experiments on chamfering of the edges of a part in an injection molding machine are reported