Concept of an offline correction method based on historical data for milling operations using industrial robots

Abstract

Industrial robots for machining applications have been researched to achieve an alternative, flexible and less expensive machining technology against conventional machine tools. The previous work on industrial robots indicates that industrial robots are only applicable without requirement of high accuracy. The low accuracy and instability under various configurations of industry robot are still major barriers for deploying robots for machining in industries. In this paper, a new method, namely historical data based correction (HDC), is presented to improve the accuracy of industrial robots for milling operations. First, the HDC method is able to calculate the corrected values to compensate the systematical errors during milling operations. Consequently, new tool paths of robots with corrected values are generated. In addition, the HDC method is able to fulfill the requirement of large-scale production. With the proposed method, the surface quality of the machined parts can be improved by more than 60 % without using any additional measuring systems.