Abstract
When an industrial robot grinds a curved surface of a workpiece, an operator must accurately teach the configuration of the surface. This teaching, however, is a very troublesome job because of the large number of the teaching points.
This paper proposes a teachingless grinding robot to save that trouble. This robot system consists of a manipulator mounted a cylindrical grindstone on the end-effector, instruments to measure the three different forces and a computer equipped with an AD converter. One of the force informations is a grinding torque, and the others are the two components of a grinding force which is applied to the grindstone from the workpiece. The coordinates of the points where the grindstone contacts with the workpiece is calculated from these force informations by the computer. Therefore, the robot is able to recognize the contour of the workpiece and to grind it without teaching. The experiments using an articulated robot arm with five degrees of freedom show that the proposed robot system is applicable to the grinding of the continuous curved surface of a workpiece.
