A novel arc-spraying robot for rapid tooling

Abstract

In order to reduce the process uncertainty and the labor intensity in manual metal arc spraying for rapid tooling, this paper presents a robot wrist design and a robot motion control method based on the cross-sectional contours and related surface normal vectors extracted from STL model, a de facto standard for representing a 3D part geometry in rapid prototyping (RP) industry. A computer controlled five-axis robot for the rapid tooling was built by using the wrist, which drives the spraying gun. The wrist comprises a linkage that can maintain the working position of the gun while changing its spraying orientation freely. Such a design ensures that adjusting the gun along the normal of the master surface to satisfy the process requirement will not result in any position change of the spraying point. A kinematic analysis on the wrist indicates this kinematic decoupling between the positioning mechanism and the orientating mechanism. The working trajectory of the gun is generated off-line by slicing the STL model of the master pattern. To bypass the need for any teaching or NC programming, the arc-spraying robot can carry out the tooling process automatically and efficiently fully based on the sliced data of the master pattern. In addition, a case study on the production of automobile body panel dies using this robotic tooling system is introduced.