Design and Software of a Robotic Station for Deburring Car Rims

More and more often, production processes use solutions in which robots cooperate with vision systems. This is related to the implementation of "pick and place" tasks or tool path correction during the machining process. Vision systems exchange information with robot controllers, which enables the detection of a specific object, obtaining information about its location and orientation. As part of the article, it was decided to design and build a robotic station in the RobotStudio environment for deburring car rims. The process of designing the algorithm in the MATLAB environment that allows to determine the position and orientation of the processed detail was presented. Both MATLAB and RobotStudio environments communicate via the TCP/IP protocol. The verification of operation and simulation of the constructed station were presented.

Development of Tool Path Correction Algorithm in Incremental Sheet Forming

The problem of obtaining sound parts by Incremental Sheet Forming is still a relevant issue, despite the numerous efforts spent in improving the toolpath planning of the deforming punch in order to compensate for the dimensional and geometrical part errors related to springback and punch movement. Usually, the toolpath generation strategy takes into account the variation of the toolpath itself for obtaining the desired final part with reduced geometrical errors. In the present paper, a correction algorithm is used to iteratively correct the part geometry on the basis of the measured parts and on the calculation of the error defined as the difference between the actual and the nominal part geometries. In practice, the part geometry is used to generate a first trial toolpath, and the form error distribution of the resulting part is used for modifying the nominal part geometry and, then, generating a new, improved toolpath. This procedure gets iterated until the error distribution becomes less than a specified value, corresponding to the desired part tolerance. The correction algorithm was implemented in software and used with the results of FEM simulations. In particular, with few iterations it was possible to reduce the geometrical error to less than 0.4 mm in the Incremental Sheet Forming process of an Al asymmetric part, with a resulting accuracy good enough for both prototyping and production processes.

Force Prediction for Correction of Robot Tool Path in Single Point Incremental Forming

In this work, an off-line compensation procedure, based on an elastic modelling of the machine structure coupled with a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of the process is applied to Robotized Single Point Incremental Forming (RSPIF). Assuming an ideal stiff robot, the FEA evaluates the Tool Center Point (TCP) forces during the forming stage. These forces are then defined as an input data of the elastic robot model to predict and correct the tool path deviations. In order to make efficient the tool path correction, the weight of three numerical and material parameters of the FEA on the predicted forces is investigated. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed method is validated by the comparison between numerical and experimental geometries obtained with or without correction of the tool path.