Development of an integrated robotic polishing system

This thesis presents research carried out as part of a project undertaken in fulfilment of the requirements of Loughborough University for the award of Philosophical Doctorate. The main focus of this research is to investigate and develop an appropriate level of automation to the existing manual finishing operations of small metallic components to achieve required surface quality and to remove superficial defects. In the manufacturing industries, polishing processes play a vital role in the development of high precision products, to give a desired surface finish, remove defects, break sharp edges, extend the working life cycle, and meet mechanical specification. The polishing operation is generally done at the final stage of the manufacturing process and can represent up to a third of the production time. Despite the growth automated technology in industry, polishing processes are still mainly carried out manually, due to the complexity and constraints of the process. Manual polishing involves a highly qualified worker polishing the workpiece by hand. These processes are very labour intensive, highly skill dependent, costly, error-prone, environmentally hazardous due to abrasive dust, and - in some cases - inefficient with long process times. In addition, the quality of the finishing is dependent on the training, experience, fatigue, physical ability, and expertise of the operator. Therefore, industries are seeking alternative solutions to be implemented within their current processes. These solutions are mainly aimed at replacing the human operator to improve the health and safety of their workforce and improve their competitiveness. Some automated solutions have already been proposed to assist or replace manual polishing processes. These solutions provide limited capabilities for specific processes or components, and a lack of flexibility and dexterity. One of the reasons for their lack of success is identified as neglecting the study and implementing the manual operations. This research initially hypothesised that for an effective development, an automated polishing system should be designed based on the manual polishing operations. Therefore, a successful implementation of an automated polishing system requires a thorough understanding of the polishing process and their operational parameters. This study began by collaborating with an industrial polishing company. The research was focused on polishing complex small components, similar to the parts typically used in the aerospace industry. The high level business processes of the polishing company were capture through several visits to the site. The low level operational parameters and the understanding of the manual operations were also captured through development of a devices that was used by the expert operators. A number of sensors were embedded to the device to facilitate recording the manual operations. For instance, the device captured the force applied by the operator (avg. 10 N) and the cycle time (e.g. 1 pass every 5 sec.). The capture data was then interpreted to manual techniques and polishing approaches that were used in developing a proof-of-concept Integrated Robotic Polishing System (IRPS). The IRPS was tested successfully through several laboratory based experiments by expert operators. The experiment results proved the capability of the proposed system in polishing a variety of part profiles, without pre-existing geometrical information about the parts. One of the main contributions made by this research is to propose a novel approach for automated polishing operations. The development of an integrated robotic polishing system, based on the research findings, uses a set of smart sensors and a force-position-by-increment control algorithm, and transpose the way that skilled workers carry out polishing processes

Vision guided robotic inspection for parts in manufacturing and remanufacturing industry

Environmental and commercial drivers are leading to a circular economy, where systems and components are routinely recycled or remanufactured. Unlike traditional manufacturing, where components typically have a high degree of tolerance, components in the remanufacturing process may have seen decades of wear, resulting in a wider variation of geometries. This makes it difficult to translate existing automation techniques to perform Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) for such components autonomously. The challenge of performing automated inspections, with off-line tool-paths developed from Computer Aided Design (CAD) models, typically arises from the fact that those paths do not have the required level of accuracy. Beside the fact that CAD models are less available for old parts, these parts often differ from their respective virtual models. This paper considers flexible automation by combining part geometry reconstruction with ultrasonic tool-path generation, to perform Ultrasonic NDT. This paper presents an approach to perform custom vision-guided ultrasonic inspection of components, which is achieved through integrating an automated vision system and a purposely developed graphic user interface with a robotic work-cell. The vision system, based on structure from motion, allows creating 3D models of the parts. Also, this work compares four different tool-paths for optimum image capture. The resulting optimum 3D models are used in a virtual twin environment of the robotic inspection cell, to enable the user to select any points of interest for ultrasonic inspection. This removes the need of offline robot path-planning and part orientation for assessing specific locations on a part, which is typically a very time-consuming phase

Vision guided robotic inspection for parts in manufacturing and remanufacturing industry

Environmental and commercial drivers are leading to a circular economy, where systems and components are routinely recycled or remanufactured. Unlike traditional manufacturing, where components typically have a high degree of tolerance, components in the remanufacturing process may have seen decades of wear, resulting in a wider variation of geometries. This makes it difficult to translate existing automation techniques to perform Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) for such components autonomously. The challenge of performing automated inspections, with off-line tool-paths developed from Computer Aided Design (CAD) models, typically arises from the fact that those paths do not have the required level of accuracy. Beside the fact that CAD models are less available for old parts, these parts often differ from their respective virtual models. This paper considers flexible automation by combining part geometry reconstruction with ultrasonic tool-path generation, to perform Ultrasonic NDT. This paper presents an approach to perform custom vision-guided ultrasonic inspection of components, which is achieved through integrating an automated vision system and a purposely developed graphic user interface with a robotic work-cell. The vision system, based on structure from motion, allows creating 3D models of the parts. Also, this work compares four different tool-paths for optimum image capture. The resulting optimum 3D models are used in a virtual twin environment of the robotic inspection cell, to enable the user to select any points of interest for ultrasonic inspection. This removes the need of offline robot path-planning and part orientation for assessing specific locations on a part, which is typically a very time-consuming phase

Context-Enabled Visualization Strategies for Automation Enabled Human-in-the-loop Inspection Systems to Enhance the Situation Awareness of Windstorm Risk Engineers

Insurance loss prevention survey, specifically windstorm risk inspection survey is the process of investigating potential damages associated with a building or structure in the event of an extreme weather condition such as a hurricane or tornado. Traditionally, the risk inspection process is highly subjective and depends on the skills of the engineer performing it. This dissertation investigates the sensemaking process of risk engineers while performing risk inspection with special focus on various factors influencing it. This research then investigates how context-based visualizations strategies enhance the situation awareness and performance of windstorm risk engineers. An initial study investigated the sensemaking process and situation awareness requirements of the windstorm risk engineers. The data frame theory of sensemaking was used as the framework to carry out this study. Ten windstorm risk engineers were interviewed, and the data collected were analyzed following an inductive thematic approach. The themes emerged from the data explained the sensemaking process of risk engineers, the process of making sense of contradicting information, importance of their experience level, internal and external biases influencing the inspection process, difficulty developing mental models, and potential technology interventions. More recently human in the loop systems such as drones have been used to improve the efficiency of windstorm risk inspection. This study provides recommendations to guide the design of such systems to support the sensemaking process and situation awareness of windstorm visual risk inspection. The second study investigated the effect of context-based visualization strategies to enhance the situation awareness of the windstorm risk engineers. More specifically, the study investigated how different types of information contribute towards the three levels of situation awareness. Following a between subjects study design 65 civil/construction engineering students completed this study. A checklist based and predictive display based decision aids were tested and found to be effective in supporting the situation awareness requirements as well as performance of windstorm risk engineers. However, the predictive display only helped with certain tasks like understanding the interaction among different components on the rooftop. For remaining tasks, checklist alone was sufficient. Moreover, the decision aids did not place any additional cognitive demand on the participants. This study helped us understand the advantages and disadvantages of the decision aids tested. The final study evaluated the transfer of training effect of the checklist and predictive display based decision aids. After one week of the previous study, participants completed a follow-up study without any decision aids. The performance and situation awareness of participants in the checklist and predictive display group did not change significantly from first trial to second trial. However, the performance and situation awareness of participants in the control condition improved significantly in the second trial. They attributed this to their exposure to SAGAT questionnaire in the first study. They knew what issues to look for and what tasks need to be completed in the simulation. The confounding effect of SAGAT questionnaires needs to be studied in future research efforts

Vision-assisted robotic finishing of friction stir-welded corner joints

One required process in the fabrication of large components is welding, after which there may be a need for machining to achieve final dimensions and uniform surfaces. Friction stir-welding (FSW) is a typical example after which a series of deburring and grinding operations are carried out. Currently, the majority of these operations are carried out either manually, by human workers, or on machine tools which results in bottlenecks in the process flows. This paper presents a robotic finishing system to automate the finishing of friction stir-welded parts with minimum human involvement. In a sequence, the system can scan and reconstruct the 3D model of the part, localise it in the robot frame and generate a suitable machining path accordingly, to remove the excess material from FSW without violating process constraints. Results of the cutting trials carried out for demonstration have shown that the developed system can consistently machine the corner joints of an industrial scale part to desired surface quality which is around 1.25 μm in, Ra, the arithmetic average of the surface roughness

Advanced teleoperation and control system for industrial robots based on augmented virtuality and haptic feedback

There are some industrial tasks that are still mainly performed manually by human workers due to their complexity, which is the case of surface treatment operations (such as sanding, deburring, finishing, grinding, polishing, etc.) used to repair defects. This work develops an advanced teleoperation and control system for industrial robots in order to assist the human operator to perform the mentioned tasks. On the one hand, the controlled robotic system provides strength and accuracy, holding the tool, keeping the right tool orientation and guaranteeing a smooth approach to the workpiece. On the other hand, the advanced teleoperation provides security and comfort to the user when performing the task. In particular, the proposed teleoperation uses augmented virtuality (i.e., a virtual world that includes non-modeled real-world data) and haptic feedback to provide the user an immersive virtual experience when remotely teleoperating the tool of the robot system to treat arbitrary regions of the workpiece surface. The method is illustrated with a car body surface treatment operation, although it can be easily extended to other surface treatment applications or even to other industrial tasks where the human operator may benefit from robotic assistance. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown with several experiments using a 6R robotic arm. Moreover, a comparison of the performance obtained manually by an expert and that obtained with the proposed method has also been conducted in order to show the suitability of the proposed approach

The Federal Conference on Intelligent Processing Equipment

Research and development projects involving intelligent processing equipment within the following U.S. agencies are addressed: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, NASA, National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation

Propuesta de inclusión de esfuerzos en el control de un brazo robot para asegurar el cumplimiento de la rugosidad superficial durante operaciones de lijado en diferentes materiales

Tesis por compendio[ES] El mecanizado con brazos robots ha sido estudiado aproximadamente desde los años 90, durante este tiempo se han llevado a cabo importantes avances y descubrimientos en cuanto a su campo de aplicación. En general, los robots manipuladores tienen muchos beneficios y ventajas al ser usados en operaciones de mecanizado, tales como, flexibilidad, gran área de trabajo y facilidad de programación, entre otras, frente a las Máquinas Herramientas de Control numérico (MHCN) que necesitan de una gran inversión para trabajar piezas muy grandes o incrementar sus grados de libertad. Como desventajas, frente a las MHCN, los brazos robóticos poseen menor rigidez, lo que combinado con las altas fuerzas producidas en los procesos de mecanizado hace que aparezcan errores de precisión, desviaciones en las trayectorias, vibraciones y, por consiguiente, una mala calidad en las piezas fabricadas. Entre los brazos robots, los brazos colaborativos están en auge debido a su programación intuitiva y a sus medidas de seguridad, que les permiten trabajar en el mismo espacio que los operadores sin que estos corran riesgos. Como desventaja añadida de los robots colaborativos se encuentra la mayor flexibilidad que estos tienen en sus articulaciones, debido a que incluyen reductores del tipo Harmonic drive. El uso de un control de fuerza en procesos de mecanizado con brazos robots permite controlar y corregir en tiempo real las desviaciones generadas por la flexibilidad en las articulaciones del robot. Utilizar este método de control es beneficioso en cualquier brazo robot; sin embargo, el control interno que incluyen los robots colaborativos presenta ventajas que permiten que el control de fuerza pueda ser aplicado de una manera más eficiente. En el presente trabajo se desarrolla una propuesta real para la inclusión del control de esfuerzos en el brazo robot, así como también, se evalúa y cuantifica la capacidad de los robots industriales y colaborativos en tareas de mecanizado. La propuesta plantea cómo mejorar la utilización de un control de fuerza por bucle interior/exterior aplicado en un brazo colaborativo cuando se desconocen los pares reales de los motores del robot, así como otros parámetros internos que los fabricantes no dan a conocer. Este bucle de control interior/exterior ha sido utilizado en aplicaciones de pulido y lijado sobre diferentes materiales. Los resultados indican que el robot colaborativo es factible para realizar tales operaciones de mecanizado. Sus mejores resultados se obtienen cuando se utiliza un bucle de control interno por velocidad y un bucle de control externo de fuerza con algoritmos, Proporcional-Integral-Derivativo o Proporcional más Pre-Alimentación de la Fuerza.[CA] El mecanitzat amb braços robots ha estat estudiat aproximadament des dels anys 90, durant aquest temps s'han dut a terme importants avanços i descobriments en el que fa al seu camp d'aplicació. En general, els robots manipuladors tenen molts beneficis i avantatges al ser usats en operacions de mecanitzat, com ara, flexibilitat, gran àrea de treball i facilitat de programació, entre d'altres, davant de Màquines Eines de Control Numèric (MECN) que necessiten d'una gran inversió per treballar peces molt grans o incrementar els seus graus de llibertat. Com a desavantatges, enfront de les MECN, els braços robòtics posseeixen menor rigidesa, el que combinat amb les altes forces produïdes en els processos de mecanitzat fa que apareguin errors de precisió, desviacions en les trajectòries, vibracions i, per tant, una mala qualitat en les peces fabricades. Entre els braços robots, els braços col·laboratius estan en auge a causa de la seva programació intuïtiva i a les seves mesures de seguretat, que els permeten treballar en el mateix espai que els operadors sense que aquests corrin riscos. Com desavantatge afegida als robots col·laboratius es troba la major flexibilitat que aquests tenen en les seves articulacions, a causa de que inclouen reductors del tipus Harmonic drive. L'ús d'un control de força en processos de mecanitzat amb braços robots permet controlar, i corregir, en temps real les desviacions generades per la flexibilitat en les articulacions del robot. Utilitzar aquest mètode de control és beneficiós en qualsevol braç robot, però, el control intern que inclouen els robots col·laboratius presenta avantatges que permeten que el control de força es puga aplicar d'una manera més eficient. En el present treball es desenvolupa una proposta real per a la inclusió del control d'esforços en el braç robot, així com s'avalua i quantifica la capacitat dels robots industrials i col·laboratius en tasques de mecanitzat. La proposta planteja com millorar la utilització d'un control de força per bucle interior/exterior aplicat en un braç col·laboratiu, quan es desconeixen els parells reals dels motors del robot, així com altres paràmetres interns que els fabricants no donen a conèixer. Aquest bucle de control interior/exterior ha estat utilitzat en aplicacions de polit sobre diferents materials. Els resultats indiquen que el robot col·laboratiu és factible de realitzar aquestes operacions de mecanitzat. Els seus millors resultats s'obtenen quan s'utilitza un bucle de control intern per velocitat i un bucle de control extern de força amb els algoritmes Proporcional-Integral-Derivatiu o Proporcional més Pre-alimentació de la Força.[EN] Machining with robot arms has been studied approximately since the 90s; during this time, important advances and discoveries have been made in its field of application. In general, manipulative robots have many benefits and advantages when they are used in machining operations, such as flexibility, large work area, and ease of programming, among others, compared to Numerical Control Machine Tools (NCMT) that need a great investment to work very large pieces or increase their degrees of freedom. As for disadvantages, compared to NCMT, robotic arms have lower rigidity, which, combined with the high forces produced in machining processes, causes precision errors, path deviations, vibrations, and, consequently, poor quality in the manufactured parts. Among robot arms, collaborative arms are on the rise due to their intuitive programming and safety measures, which allow them to work in the same space without risk for the operators. An added disadvantage of collaborative robots is their flexibility in their joints because they include Harmonic drive type reducers. The use of force control in machining processes with robot arms makes possible to control and correct, in real-time, the deviations generated by the flexibility in the robot's joints. The use of this control method is beneficial for any robot arm. However, the internal control included in collaborative robots has advantages that allow the force control to be applied more efficiently. In this work, a real proposal is developed to include effort control in the robot arm. The capacity of industrial and collaborative robots in machining tasks is evaluated and quantified. The proposal recommends how to improve the use of an inner/outer force control loop applied in a collaborative arm, when the real torques of the robot's motors are unknown and other internal parameters that manufacturers do not disclose. This inner/outer control loop has been used in polishing and sanding applications on different materials. The results indicate that the collaborative robot is feasible to perform such machining operations. Best results are obtained using an internal velocity control loop and external force control loop with Proportional-Integral-Derivative or Proportional plus Feed Forward.The authors are grateful for the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and European Union, grant DPI2016-81002-R (AEI/FEDER, UE). This work was funded by the CONICYT PFCHA/DOCTORADO BECAS CHILE/2017 – 72180157.Pérez Ubeda, RA. (2022). Propuesta de inclusión de esfuerzos en el control de un brazo robot para asegurar el cumplimiento de la rugosidad superficial durante operaciones de lijado en diferentes materiales [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/182000TESISCompendi