Fractal Path Application in a Metal Mold Polis! ing Robot System Yoshio Mizugaki, Masafumi Sakamoto and Keisuke Kamijo Kyushu Institute of Technology Department of Mechanical Engineering Tobata, Kitakyushu 804 Japan E-mafl: "TAS825@JPNKISCT.BITNET Aostract-This paper describes an industrial agplication of fractal ‘path into “a metal mold Polishing robot system. This Le characterized” by The fact that's fraceal curve ie suitable to cover 1s troo-form surface uniformly at any complerity ase tolits plane filling and eelf-olallar charactarie: ties. Path generation 1s discussed in terme of "the peroneter” dousin of a spline murface and ite oF thogonal projection. The robot system consists of fm varticulated industrial robot of € D.0.?. and a Polishing end-effector vith the co ‘force Sontrol- The polishing experiments ax to the ‘con tact force control and) fractal pathe are present 1. INTRODUCTION The importance of the metal mold manu facturing has been increasing from the view point of not only industrial effects but engineering approaches because there are many unresolved issues left in it. One of these important and unresolved issues is the problem of automation in metal mold polishing. It is known as a ‘time-consuming process. Through many previous studies, e.g. [1,2], in the construction of an automation system, it is well known that the combination of a CAD/CAM system and a machining system brings fruitful results and promotes the forth-coming generation of the manufac~ turing automation. A polishing robot system with use of CAD/CAM data has been developed and shown ‘the promising performance as an autona- tion system in polishing [3]. The path generation for a polishing end-effector has some inherent problems, nevertheless, and a new approach is requested. This study deals with the fractal path genera- Manuscript received April 7, 1901. tion onto a free-form surface and the utility of the contact force control ‘through polishing experiments. 2. POLISHING ROBOT SYSTEM A. Hardware Configuration ‘The polishing robot system has been developed as a subsystem of a total metal mold manufacturing system. The data communication is done in Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAD/ CAM) system, P-CAPS/CAD-CAM [2]. P-CAPS/ CAD-CAM is installed into the laboratory Local Area Network shown in Fig. 1. P- CAPS/CAD-CAM system described in section 2.B is installed in HP9000-350SRX and the robot program of P-CAPS/CAM system is partially in HP9000-318. P-caps/cRD cam sp-cm ‘a 600m = | _ ita, i" ro 5 et = sy TARISANAEAAC-V3 parvo, 25 fear = Zé yf. HoToMAN 1-30 Fig.1 Laboratory LAN. ‘e.007491600.0831501.00 ©1991 IRE‘The robot system consists of an indus~ trial robot system (Motoman L-30 manufac tured by Yasukawa Electric Mfg. Co., Ltd.) inclusive of its controller, a polishing end-effector attached as a robot-hand and a personal computer (NEC PC-9801VK). The data file transfer of mold shape CAD data and/or robot motion commands is carried out between the robot controller and the HP9000-318 through the personal computer by means of RS232C Serial interface devices. The industrial robot Motoman L-30 is an articulated manipulator and has 6 Degrees of Freedom (0.0.F.) exclusive of that of the end- effector. Its pay load is 30kg and its Positioning accuracy is less than 0.2 mm. See Fig. 2. Fig. 3 shows the configuration of the polishing end-effector. The polishing end-effector consists of an air grinder, a linear ball bearing, a stepping motor inclusive of a reduction gear system, a feed screw of 2.5 mm pitch, a coiled spring, an electric micrometer and a frame. ‘The stepping motor and the serew are used for the rectilinear motion of the air grinder to the mold surface. The stepping motor is driven at the rate of 500 pulses/revolution and the reduction ratio is 1/100. The stepping motor is a § phase D.C. motor and controlled by a command of a personal computer NEC PC8801 connected to the stepping motor driver. GENS tne andustrial tonot ‘Bie Dimensional spectricatson EL ig Be Fig.2 Robot specification. The reduction gear system implemented is a kind of planetary gear systems, named Harmonic drive system. An electric micrometer is used to detect the recti- Linear motion distance of the air grinder and the stepping motor action is compen. sated with it. The weight of the air grinder and the total weight of the end- effector are 180 g and about 2 kg respec tively. Tha frame york is made of alumi- nun alloy. The grinding wheels used are a rubber grinding wheel, felt buffs and a soft felt buff. The cylindrical grinding wheels are dressed by chamfering like a ball-end mill shape and they are attached to the air grinder. The concentric area of grinding wheels is removed and dressed because its polishing speed around the center is nearly equal to zero. B. Software Configuration In | P-CAPS/CAD-CAM system, two data structures are adopted, ‘Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) and Lattice space model Z-map. The former is used in CAD and the latter in CAM. A CSG geometric model designed as a metal mold surface can be easily converted to a model in Z- map. Because Z-map represents the set of ; G Wrist ange Lina =f ase mtr Mii Searing | FE | et sre wom CEE tai Uh. d Sliding plate Coiled spring Ar spindle sntor Yortpiee Fig.3 Polishing end-effector.Fig.4 Lattice space model Z-map. the heights of points that are obtained by the orthogonal projection in the Z- direction from the lattice points of x-Y domain onto a free-form surface. See Fig. 4. The contact force control is adopted in an actual polishing process. It is done by detecting the spring length and driv- ing a feed screw so as to keep the spring length constant during the polishing. Moreover by controlling the spring length adaptively along a polishing path, some flexible and promising polishing ‘opera tions can be easily obtained. One of the merits is not to request any preparation or special modification of robot motion commands because the movenent of the end- effector tracks the metal mold surface and absorbs the positioning error between ‘the surface and the robot path. Another merit is to prevent the over-polishing around a corner edge of a metal mold surface. These merits are going to be certified in the following experimental results ‘3. FRACTAL PATH GENERATION A. Fractal Fractal is a word invented by Mandel- brot and is known as a pattern such as a formless and/or full-fledged one. They have not only a curve but also a patch enclosing an area. Some of them are illustrated through a lot of impressive examples and discussed mathematically in (a. In this application, there are used the characteristics of “plane-filling” and “self-similarity” of fractal curves like ‘a Peano curve. Of course, the degree of complexity is easily designed by the degree of depth-nesting in the path generation and is applicable suited to Planar motion jobs. B. Fractal Path Generation Robot motions in industrial applica~ tions are usually classified two types, fast motion and fine motion. The former belongs to the movement of material transfer and a spatially unrestricted trajectory. On the other hand, the latter concerns with the actual manipulation of a workpiece and a spatially restricted trajectory. A metal mold polishing work belongs to the latter. Because a trajectory consists of a spatial path and a velocity distribution along the path, the relationship between them is very important. Strictly speak- ing, a path inclusive of position and orientation and a velocity distribution should be designed respectively [5]. The orientation of end-effector along a fractal path in polishing is designed normal to the metal mold surface in order to let the grinding wheel contact to the surface perpendicularly. In this application, a Peano curve is adopted as a fractal curve and applied to a polishing path along a free-form sur- face of a metal mold. Its characteristic of “plane-filling” is important and suitable to planar motion jobs such as polishing, gluing, painting and so on. Furthermore the properties of most scal~ ing fractals, “invariant under change of scale" and "self-similarity," are desira~ ble to the implementation of programming in industrial applications.From the view point of design criteria in the fractal path generation, there are some important issues left. One of thom is about the definition of "Peano dis- tance." This coneerns with the problem that “what parameter is requested in the representation of a Peano curve" and with the property of “self-similarity.” If the distance is defined by the order of the visits as shown in [4] and not requested isometric, a mapped path from a planar Peano curve onto a free-form surface may be called a fractal path too, ‘A Peano curve on a free-form surface is generated through the following steps. 1, To generate a planar Peano curve the X-Y domain of the workpiece. To project the planar Peano curve onto the free-form surface orthogonally in the Z-direction. 2 On the other hand, it is also possible to generate a fractal path directly on such a free-form surface as a spline surface. In this case, a planar fractal path is firstly generated in the u-v Parameter domain and secondly a spatial path is calculated and obtained through ‘the polynomials of the spline function. For example, let a free-form surface represented in a Bezier pateh with the degrees of 3. Position vector P(u,v) on a patch is obtained as below according to Parameter u and v. (av) = veM eu, P Vz (v8 gv2(1-v) ay(1-v)? (1-v)? ). v= ( (1-w)? 3u(1-u)? 3u2(1-u) ou?) M Pos Pin P29 Pa Po Piz. P22 Paa Por Pir P21 Pa Poo Pio P20 P30 liere, Puy is called as a control point vector. Parameter u and v are in (0,1) respectively and corresponding to the x- and Y-direction. A shape of patch is controlled by 16 control points (4 by 4) and each boundary curve starts at the first control point and ends in the fourth point. For example, a boundary starts at Poo and ends in Pos and can be expressed in Hosaka’s representation (6) as follows. P(O,v) = {vB + (1-v)}2 * Poo. B is called as the shift operator and effects to proceed a control point to the next one. (Poe = BvePo: Bv#(Ev*Poo) = Ev? * Poo.) Roughly speaking, a fractal path is generated with the convolution and con- sists of many short segments. It might cause any troublesome side effects in terms of the dynamics of the articulated linkage. Nevertheless, the moving veloci- ty of the polishing end-effector is so slow as about § mm/sec along the fractal path. There is no fear to cause any self- vibration phenomena nor to pass singular points. Therefore, there would be no restrictions to design and generate a fractal path on a free-form surface. 4, EXPERIMENT ‘The experiments were carried out in the following two manners. The first is a comparative experiment which aims to investigate the effect of the contact force control. The second is an experi- ment about fractal paths; generating paths and polishing actually a metal mold with them, In the first experiment, two approaches of the contact force control are adopted. One is the way to modify a nominal motion path itself so as to vary the polishing contact force according to a surface. Fig. 5 shows the profiles of corner edges polished by two comparative paths, a nominal path with a constant contact force and a modified path with decreasing the contact force toward the edge. It is clearly seen that the latter path keeps a corner edge sharp compared with the former path. The other is the way to control the spring length without moditi- cation of a nominal motion path. The profiles of a plane metal mold polished eywith and without a contact force control are compared in Fig. 8. In this case, the end-effector is moved along an undesira~ ble pitching path. The contact force control by adjusting the spring length keeps a plane surface flat regardless of the pitching path. On the other hand, the polishing work vith a constant spring length along the pitching path causes a waved profile of the metal mold surface. In the second experiment, the fractal path generation on a plane and a free- form surface is done. The polishing experiments along fractal paths are exe~ cuted. The shape of the workpiece is a surface of spheroidal revolution with filleting. A fractal path on it is shown in Fig. 7. It is easily seen that the complexity of self-similarity of the tT a Fig.5 The effect of contact force control around a corner edge. 4: Mn ya peraea leigh viet 5: Fat sep be sa pth vats tie ent pee cata be ative catatpresate cotrol Conditices Feed rate of Noripece Fig.6 The effect of contact force control in a pitching path. fractal path is determined by the depth of nesting in recursive calculation. The orientation along these paths in polish- ing experiments are set perpendicular to the metal mold surface. Fig. 8 (a) shows ‘the rate of component X- and Y-direction- al short vectors of polishing paths Fig. 8 (b,c) indicates the variance of the surface roughness polished by a fractal path and a S-figure scanning path. The shape is a plane of S3sC. By using a fractal path in polishing, fine surface roughness is achieved. (a) A Peano path on a free-form surface with a large unit. (b) A Peano path on a free-form surface with a small unit. Fig.7 Fractal paths on a free-form sur- face 6sToot Path = Wle Le wz] 3 | is 660) con | boo] tae ano TT 8) 7] seo] cate | con (a) Rate of numbers of component. short vectors 2 5 Bis eid 5 ° 88 158.260 968 ASB S00 658 750 O50 Surface roughness Rz (mm) polished by a Peano path. (b) Variance of surface roughness of a plane polished by a fractal path. 2 5 a N= 30 Bis 10 9 5 242 Loe ‘5B 158 258 358 458 $58 658 758 558 Surface roughness Rz (pe) polished by a S-figure scanning path. (c) Variance of surface roughness of a plane polished by a S-figure scanning path Fig.8 Comparative experimental results of fractal and scanning paths in polishing @ plane. 5. CONCLUSION ‘Through the development of the polish= ing robot system with the contact force control and the fractal path generation, the following remarks are obtained 1) A polishing robot system with a con- tact force control mechanism has Promising capabilities and potentials in the automation of metal mold manu. facturing processes. The properties of "plane-filling" and “self-similarity” of fractal paths are meaningful to a robotic path in indus~ trial applications In the fractal path generation on a free-form surface, the machining conditions should be considered as a criteria of path design 2) a REFERENCES [iJshirai,K., Murakami,H., 1989, A Com- pact and Practical CAD/CAM System for Progressive Dies, Bulletin Japan Society of Precision Engineering (JSPE), Vol.23, No.1, 25-30. 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