Development of Heat Treatment Robot System for Car Body Mold Using Diode Laser Optics

Car body mold service life can be extended and have higher quality by increasing wear resistance through surface heat treatment. Laser heat treatment, one of the representative surface heat treatment methods, is very dangerous for manual work due to laser´s distinct characteristics, and is unable to do precision work. In this study, we developed diode laser based heat treatment robot system to establish laser heat treatment automation. In addition, we developed 2-axis redundancy for 6-axis multi-joint robot to extend the work area during car body mold heat treatment. At the same time, we developed sensor device that can safely protect operator and laser optic head. Also, we implemented experiment design from Taguchi Method to perform experiment with various laser heat treatment automation criteria, and secured D/B from the experiment to further study optimum experiment condition.