Automatic Path Planning for Door-Milling Application Using an Industrial Robot

Abstract

This report covers automatic path planning for a 6 degree of freedom industrial robot used in a milling application. The kinematics are derived for the ABB IRB6600 robot used in this master thesis. Different sensors for determining the work-object pose in relation to the robot are evaluated, and a suggested vision system is presented and tested. When industrial robots are used in high precision contact applications, such as milling, the robot stiffness must be considered. Therefore, a joint stiffness analysis is conducted for the ABB IRB6600. The results from the stiffness analysis are, in addition to the milling force data, used to compensate for deflection when generating the robot path trajectory. The same data is also used to find favourable operation configurations for the robot. Important elements when using an industrial robot in a milling application are presented and evaluated to assure a good end-product. Finally, a method for automatic generation of robot path trajectory, extracted from a database, containing door data is presented. Here, the previously mentioned sensor system is used in addition to the path generation code to create a *.txt file, which can be read by RAPID code. The RAPID code is further executed by the robot to mill the desired features in the door.