A robotic belt grinding approach based on easy-to-grind region partitioning

Abstract

For workpieces featured with complex shapes, it is difficult to plan their toolpaths for robotic belt grinding by off-line programming (OLP) owing to frequent gouges between the workpiece and contact wheels. Hence, this work presents a region-based robotic belt grinding approach to facilitate avoiding such gouges for toolpath generation. With the approach, gouge analysis algorithms for two main belt grinding modes, namely wheel face grinding and wheel edge grinding respectively, are proposed. Machinability analyses of these two modes in machining various types of surfaces are then conducted. A concept, namely ‘easy-to-grind region’, is proposed so that the surface to be ground can be partitioned into different regions, and then by imitating the behavior of experienced workers in manual grinding to avoid gouges, the algorithm to select compatible belt grinding mode for partitioned regions is presented. Experimental studies are conducted and show that the proposed approach can significantly decrease the complexity in generating a gouge-avoidance toolpath for belt grinding such complex workpieces.