The study deals with the automatic chamfering for the case of a machined hole on a cylinder on the basis of CAD data, using an industrial robot. As a chamfering tool, a rotary-bar driven by an electric motor is mounted to the arm of the robot having six degrees of freedom in order to give an arbitrary position and attitude to the tool. The robot control command converted from the chamfering path is transmitted directly to the robot. From the experimental results, the system is found effective to remove a burr along the edge of a hole on a cylindrical metallic workpiece.

The study deals with the automatic spray-painting by a 6-DOF industrial robot equipped with an air spray gun. Since the conventional robot control command generation for the spray-painting is manually performed by skilled workers using a teaching-playback function of a robot controller, it is a time consuming and experience required process. The study aims at generating the robot control commands without any special knowledge on spray-painting, in the case of bumpers of a car as an example of sculptured surfaces. The system can automatically generate a spraying path for the air spray gun on the basis of CAD date of the workpiece, and change the spraying path into robot control commands. From experimental results, the system was found to be effective in painting bumpers of a car with uniform paint thickness.

This study deals with how to generate 5-axis control rough cutting NC data. The 5-axis control machining offers the potential of efficient and accurate machining. However, present CAM systems for 5-axis control are lacking in generality and functions for the tool path generation. Although the rough cutting is the most important process influencing the machining time and the condition in the following finishing process, a lot of difficulties arise to perform 5-axis control rough cutting. Especially, the collision between a tool and surrounding objects is still a severe problem. This paper suggests the collision-free tool path generation for 5-axis control rough cutting, taking account of efficiency and accuracy. The devised method allows an impeller-like shape to be actually milled with efficiency and accuracy. As a result, the validity of the method is experimentally confirmed.

The paper deals with the generation of 6-axis control collision-free polishing command data for an industrial robot with 6 degrees of freedom. Workpieces with, for example, a side wall or an overhanging sculptured surface, are difficult to polish using straight-type rotational tools since the collision between the polishing tool and the workpiece cannot be avoided. Thus, an L-shaped rotational tool consisting of a tool axis and an arm axis has been devised, where the angle of the tool axis to the arm axis can be set arbitrarily. In generating the polishing path for the L-shaped rotational tool, the 6-axis control collision avoidance method is introduced, based on our CAD/CAM system. The collision-free polishing path generated is converted into robot control command data for actual polishing work. It is experimentally shown that the system is valid for polishing workpieces with complicated shape.

Micro-machining technology is in general well known in the field of lithography, where most of the materials used have been brittle ones such as silicon-oxide. However, the requirement of producing micro-machine and/or micro-mechanism with metallic materials is increasing since a variety of workpiece configurations can be easily made. Thus, this study deals with the micro-machining of metallic workpieces with sculptured surface by use of a newly developed ultra-precision milling machine. This lathe-type ultra-precision milling machine, consisting of an z-motion table, a positionable spindle as c-rotational axis and x-motion table, is equipped with a pseudo-ball-endmill composed of a single crystal diamond tool mounted at the top of a high speed air spindle on the x-table. A control program has been developed to carry out 3-axis control micromachining. The 3-axis control program enables the tool to produce a human face-like surface with the surface roughness of 77 nm (Rmax) within a circular area of 3 mm in diameter. As a result, the possibility of generating ultraprecision sculptured metal workpieces is experimentally confirmed.

The structure of a manufacturing complex to produce parts with smooth sculptured surfaces is considered, and its prototype, consisting of a machining center and an industrial robot, is discussed with experimental results. The five-axis control machining center machines workpieces, and then grinds them on the basis of NC data avoiding collision between the tool and the workpiece. Polishing follows machining and grinding, to improve further the surface quality of the workpieces. The generation of NC data and control commands is supported by a CAD/CAM system using the solid modeling technique. The prototype of the manufacturing complex was found to be effective for obtaining complicated workpieces rapidly and accurately.>