Research Of Robotic Automatic Polishing System For Plasma Spray Rapid Mould

As a kind of rapid metal tooling method, Rapid Plasma Spray Hard Tooling(RSHT)has been used to manufacture the panel molds of the fields such as automobile, motorcycle, electrical appliance and architecture decoration. It has great application foreground because of its advantages of low cost, rapid speed, high surface reproduced accuracy and no limitation in the spray material or mould size. In order to solve the problem of long grinding time and hard labor intensity of manual grinding during polishing the big or medium-sized autobody panel moulds, this paper summarizes the latest research in the field of robotic polishing system home and abroad and then developed a robot-assisted automatic polishing system using the Motoman-UP20 6-axis robot.Firstly, this paper compare the compress air dring style and step motor dring style in the robot-assisted automatic polishing system. The step motor has been selected as the center of the robot polishing dring system to realized the strict controlling of polishing tool rotate speed. Base on the analysis of different polishing tools, the combination of flexible polishing tools and the oiled abrasive sand has been adopted and the the robot-assisted polishing system was successfully developed.Furthermore, the path-planning method base on the UG-CAM software has been adopted in this paper. The key technique of the using the milling path as the polishing path has been explained in detail. On the platform of Visual C++ , this paper developed the polishing technologic software, so that the polishng system can accurately control the path, polishing angle and realize the compensate of the polishing tool's consume. In order to ensure the planning polishing paths feasible, the robot simulation software has been introduced. Through the simulating of the polishing process in ROTSY provided by MOTOMAN Company, it can be decided whether the tool intervenes with the workpiece surface and the robot can be correctly controlled.Finally, Based on the system, processing experiments were carried out and the effects of tool rotate speed and polishing path on the surface quality were studied and the suitable polishing parameters were obtained. And a polishing experiment on a simple freeform surface has been executed and verified the robot polishing technics would't destroy the integrity of the film manufactured by plasma spay tooling. According to the above experiments, The polishing experiment on the surface of the mould manufactured by plasma spay were carried out by using the suitable parameters. Experimental results indicate that the system can be applied in polishing process of the moulds manufactured by plasma spay or other general moulds to obtain the high polishing quality.