A novel force and motion control strategy for robotic chamfering of gears

Abstract

Accurate positioning of the workpiece in the robotic work cell is currently required to perform machining operations such as chamfering in order to obtain high quality products. However, registration and workpiece fixturing errors are inevitable and lead to uncertainty in the desired robot end-effector trajectory which will lead to poor quality of the finished product. This paper proposes a method for robotic gear chamfering that can compensate for the registration error of the workpiece while avoiding use of expensive and time-consuming metrology devices for accurately registering the gear in the robot workspace. We highlight the problems in chamfering with workpiece uncertainty when traditional contour following methods are employed. A novel chamfering trajectory based on a part identification procedure is proposed that can account for the gear registration uncertainty. A force control strategy is employed in identifying the gear center and gear root positions. Based on this identification, we employ a novel force/motion strategy that can simultaneously chamfer two edges of the adjacent gear teeth. We have conducted a number of real-time experiments with a six degree-of-freedom robot to evaluate the proposed strategy, and representative chamfering experimental results are presented and discussed.