A Flexible Endoscopic Machining Tool

Flexible endoscopic tools are considerably applied in industrial image based inspecting operations, but none of them are currently effective enough to carry out machining tasks, such as grinding. If machining and inspection can be done in a single step, significant amount of labor force, money and energy can be saved in industrial repairing and maintenance tasks. This paper proposed a concept design of novel endoscopic machining tool, which aims at quantitatively and precisely removing material from imperfect components in hard-to-reach cavities, such as turbine blades in a jet engine. Prediction models are built to estimate the pose, force and material removal rate (MRR) of a modified PENTAX ES-3801 endoscope. Preliminary experimental results show that in two-dimensional (2D) grinding configuration the MRR average error of 22% has been achieved for 18 samples tested. In the end, concept designs of self-stabilized endoscopic grinding tool are proposed and discussed.