Abstract
This study deals with automation of polishing process by using an industrial robot. In polishing process, full automation of polishing operation has not been achieved due to the difficulty in visual inspection. Judgment of whether polishing is sufficient or not has been performed by skilled workers. In this study, the polishing after milling process is targeted. In the previous report, the generation of robot program for polishing operation based on CAD data was already proposed. Focusing on the periodicity of cutter mark patterns on milling surface, we proposed an automatic judgment of polished surface quality based on the image processing which uses Discrete Fourier Transformation. In order to capture images of polished surface, a CCD camera was mounted at 6-axis controlled robot hand. However, the image processing method proposed in previous report could not judge the curved cutter mark patterns because the periodicity of those patterns is not uniform. The objective of this report is the development of automatic judgment method for non-periodic cutter mark patterns. We developed judgment method which uses pattern recognition as a mean to judge existence or not of cutter marks. As a result, the developed system allows the automatic polishing that includes the surface quality judgment.
