Polishing Robot with Human Friendly Joystick Teaching System

Abstract

This chapter presents a user-friendly joystick controlled teaching system has been proposed to obtain the skillful trajectory of each polishing tool based on operator's will, and the usefulness has been examined through some experiments on teaching and polishing using an industrial robot JS-10 with an open architecture controller. In the teaching process, first, a zigzag path to be considered according to both sizes of each object and polishing tool is prepared; next, the polishing robot, which applies an impedance model following force control, profiles the object surface using the zigzag path. The operator has only to control the orientation of the polishing tool using a game joystick. Since the impedance model following force controller keeps the contact force to be a desired value, the operator has to give no attention to a sudden over-load or non-contact state. Consequently, it has been recognized that due to the joystick teaching of force control, the proposed polishing robot can be easily and safely applied to such an object as is manufactured without CAD/CAM system.