• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.107-117
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• 2003

Polishing a die that has free-form surfaces is a time-consuming and tedious job, and requires a considerable amount of high-precision skill. In order to reduce the polishing time and cope with the shortage of skilled workers, an automatic polishing robot system was developed. The polishing robot system is composed of two subsystems, a three-axis machining center and a two-axis polishing head. The machining center is controlled by a FANUC controller, and the polishing head by DSP controller. The system has five degrees of freedom and is able to keep the polishing tool normal to the die surface during operation. To easily operate the developed polishing robot system, this study developed an integrated operating program in the Windows environment. The program consists of five modules: a polishing data generation module, a code separation module, a polishing module, a graphic simulator module, and a teaching module. And, the automatic teaching system was developed to easily obtain teaching data and it consists of a three dimensional joystick and a proximity sensor. Also, to evaluate the performance of the integrated operating program and the polishing robot system, polishing experiments of a die of shadow mask were carried out.