Tool path adaption based on optical measurement data for milling with industrial robots

Industrial robots are used in a great variety of applications for handling, welding and milling operations. They represent a cost-saving and flexible alternative for machining applications. A reduced pose and path accuracy, especially under process force load due to the high mechanical compliance, restrict the use of industrial robots for further machining applications. Test results showed that these deviations range up to 0.6 mm. In this paper, a method is presented to determine the resulting path deviation of the robot under process force by using a structured light scanner. The obtained data is compared with the CAD (Computer Aided Design) data of the machined part within a developed software module. Additionally, the developed module provides functions for manipulation, registration of STL (Surface Tessellation Language) surface point clouds and a postprocessor for program translation. The comparison is performed using a dexel discretization of each data set. Based on this comparison the robot path is adapted to improve the machining quality. This method can be applied to 3- and 5-axis machining operations. The results show that the deviation can be reduced to 0.1 mm.