Enabling an Industrial Robot for Metal Cutting Operations

This paper focuses on a cost-effective manufacturing of large frame parts for aerospace industries with an industrial robot. The main challenge is the low stiffness of a serial kinematic, resulting in positioning errors due to gravity and cutting forces. Therefore, an approach is presented to optimize positioning of a robot by compensation of tool deflection. A static deflection model of the robot is built up to calculate the deflection caused by forces acting on the spindle. To detect these forces a suitable measurement device is presented. This sensing spindle holder is calibrated to detect cutting forces.