High Precision Machining Force Control of VCM-driven Deburring Equipment

Machining work using an industrial robot is one of the application areas expected to expand these days. However, it is well-known that the improvement of the trajectory control performance of the industrial robot, which is quite important to achieve high precision machining, is still challenging due to the essential elasticity of mechanisms such as reduction gear. The authors have proposed the concept of a machining robot that enables to achieve high precision machining works, where the high precision force-controlled end-effector is placed on the tip of the robot arm. In this paper, we propose the high precision machining force control system for deburring work, where the voice coil motor is introduced as an actuator, and the machining force is controlled based on the estimated force based on the reaction force observer, while the nonlinearity of the VCM is compensated, simultaneously. The effectiveness of the proposed system has been verified by the experiments using the prototype of the deburring equipment.