Abstract
Reducing the time cost of polishing process is one of the important problems in manufacturing industry of metallic molds. The feed-rate of a polishing robot is generally given to be small, if a workpiece has a large curvature. In this paper, we propose an advanced control for polishing robots so that the feed-rate along freeformed surface is .regulated suitably. It is known that the smaller the curvatures of the workpiece modeled by a 3D CAD are, the larger the distance between two adjacent steps of cutter location (CL) data generated by the mainprocessor of the CAM is. Accordingly, considering the curvature results in acquiring the distance between two adjacent steps of the CL data. The proposed controller can change the feed-rate in proportion to the distances. Promising results are shown through polishing experiments.
