Development of a robot system for complex surfaces polishing based on CL data

In most cases, polishing work is done by manual labour. It is an extremely laborious operation that demands a lot of time, so it is very expensive. In this paper, instead of manual polishing work, a robotic polishing system is introduced. A trajectory generator needed for generating the robot polishing path is taken from the cutter location data generated from the postprocessor of a CAD system. Using the trajectory generator, the present polishing robot doesn't need the conventional complicated teaching process. In order to improve the quality of a workpiece surface, a quaternion interpolation algorithm (QI algorithm) between two CL data is also proposed, which can realize the smooth interpolation of robot end-effector positions and orientation. The effectiveness of the proposed polishing method is proven through polishing experiments using an industrial robot, Motoman sv3, and a Motoman XRC Industrial controller.