Development of a Controller for Polishing Robot Attached to Machining Center and Its Performance Evaluation

Cutting process has been automated due to progress of CNC and CAD/CAM, but polishing process has been only depended on experiential knowledge of expert. Polishing work for a curved surface die demands simple and repetitive operations but requires much time for its high precision. Therefore it is operated in the handiwork by skilled worker. However the workers intend to avoid gradually polishing work because of the poor environments such as dust and noise. In order to reduce the polishing time and solve the problem of shortage of skilled workers, it has been done some research for an automation of polishing. To automate the polishing process, a 2 axes polishing robot which is attached to a 3 axes machining center has been developed by our previous research. This automatic polishing robot is able to keep the polishing tool normal on the curved surface of die. Therefore its performance of polishing is improved because of always keeping the tool normal on the surface. In this paper, the smaller sized polishing robot is developed to improve polishing performance. And the controller for 2 axes polishing robot is developed. The controller is composed of TMS320C31 with high speed which is 40-ns instruction cycle time, RAM memory with 64K words, digital input with 64 bits, digital output with 32 bits, and D/A converter with 4 channels, which is 12 bits resolution. To evaluate polishing performance of this developed robot, polishing experiment for shadow mask was carried out.