Profiling control for industrial robots using a position compensator based on cutter location data

We have already proposed a position-based impedance control for industrial robots with an open architecture controller. In this paper, it is described on how to easily apply the impedance controlled robot to a profiling task along the object with curved surface and to improve the performance using a position compensator based on the cutter location (CL) data. The CL data generated by CAD/ CAM system have information of points along the curved surface and their normal vectors. If the object is manufactured with multiaxis numerical control (NC) machine tool, the CL data can be used as the prior information of object shape. The compensator using the CL data generates not only desired trajectory in the direction of position control but also feedforward information in the direction of force control. This technique allows us to obtain the desired trajectory without complicated teaching, and to improve the performance for profiling control. Some profiling control experiments using an industrial robot JS-10 are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.